Material classification for printed circuit boards by spectral imaging system

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to a reliable material classification for printed circuit boards (PCBs) by constructing a spectral imaging system. The system works in the whole spectral range [400-700nm] and the high spectral resolution. An algorithm is presented for effectively classifying the surface material on each pixel point into several elements such as substrate, metal, resist, footprint, and paint, based on the surface-spectral reflectance estimated from the spectral imaging data. The proposed approach is an incorporation of spectral reflectance estimation, spectral feature extraction, and image segmentation processes for material classification of raw PCBs. The performance of the proposed method is compared with other methods using the RGB-reflectance based algorithm, the k-means algorithm and the normalized cut algorithm. The experimental results show the superiority of our method in accuracy and computational cost. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.