A novel convolutional neural network for electronic component classification with diverse backgrounds

The rapid development of computer vision techniques has brought new opportunities for manufacturing industries, accelerating the intelligence of manufacturing systems in terms of product quality assurance, automatic assembly, and industrial robot control. In the electronics manufacturing industry, intensive variability in component shapes and colors, background brightness, and visual contrast between components and background results in difficulties in printed circuit board image classification. In this paper, we apply computer vision techniques to detect diverse electronic components from their background images, which is a challenging problem in electronics manufacturing industries because there are multiple types of components mounted on the same printed circuit board. Specifically, a 13-layer convolutional neural network (ECON) is proposed to detect electronic components either of a single category or of diverse categories. The proposed network consists of five Convolution-MaxPooling blocks, followed by a flattened layer and two fully connected layers. An electronic component image dataset from a real manufacturing company is applied to compare the performance between ECON, Xception, VGG16, and VGG19. In this dataset, there are 11 categories of components as well as their background images. Results show that ECON has higher accuracy in both single-category and diverse component classification than the other networks.