Gerber-character recognition system of auto-teaching program for PCB assembly machines

The Gerber file is the vector-formatted drawing file for PCB manufacturing, which includes various symbols, figures and characters. We propose the character recognition system for Gerber files. The characters included in the Gerber file are written in horizontal, vertical, and reverse-vertical directions. In this paper, we newly propose the Gerber-character recognition system to recognize all of component names located in PCB. To improve the performance, we develop the multiple recognizers by neural networks and the verifier considering the structural features. The developed system has been installed to the auto-programming software for PCB assembly and inspection machines.