Parallel processing machine vision system for bare PCB inspection

In this paper, a new real time bare PCB inspection system and the inspection methods are presented. After a brief introduction of classical inspection methods, the outline of our new automatic optical inspection (AOI) system configurations and inspection methods are described. The goal of our inspection system is real time inspection without a lot of computing power consumption. Because the design-rule verification process directly to the image patterns is a time consuming process, it's not appropriate to get real time inspection speed. Instead of that, we chose the reference comparison method and overcame the disadvantages of it. This makes the inspection system cheaper, more practical and more efficient to realize than the real time inspection system. The design and development of the prototype of our new AOI system is discussed and the test results are presented to show the effectiveness of the developed inspection algorithm.