Efficient detection method for tiny defects on printed circuit boards based on focus information transfer and structurally flexible head

Abstract Aiming at the conflict between the defect feature recognition capability and the detection speed of current vision inspection techniques in the task of detecting tiny defects in printed circuit boards (PCBs). In this paper, we proposed an EPD-YOLO with a focus information transfer (FIT) structure and a structurally flexible head (SFHead). While improving the network’s ability to recognize tiny defects in similar PCBs through FIT, the feature information capturing capability of the dual SFHead structure is utilized to ensure detection accuracy and improve real-time detection speed. Experimental results show that the proposed EPD-YOLO has a mAP of 97.6 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">%</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , while the number of network parameters is only 5.13M, and it takes only 7.4 ms to detect an image, which achieves a better balance between accuracy and speed.