PCB-Faster-RCNN: An Improved Object Detection Algorithm for PCB Surface Defects

As a fundamental and indispensable component of modern electronic devices, the printed circuit board (PCB) has a complex structure and highly integrated functions, with its manufacturing quality directly affecting the stability and reliability of electronic products. However, during large-scale automated PCB production, its surfaces are prone to various defects and imperfections due to uncontrollable factors, such as diverse manufacturing processes, stringent machining precision requirements, and complex production environments, which not only compromise product functionality but also pose potential safety hazards. At present, PCB defect detection in industry still predominantly relies on manual visual inspection, the efficiency and accuracy of which fall short of the automation and intelligence demands in modern electronics manufacturing. To address this issue, in this paper, we have made improvements based on the classical Faster-RCNN object detection framework. Firstly, ResNet-101 is employed to replace the conventional VGG-16 backbone, thereby enhancing the ability to perceive small objects and complex texture features. Then, we extract features from images by using deformable convolution in the backbone network to improve the model’s adaptive modeling capability for deformed objects and irregular defect regions. Finally, the Convolutional Block Attention Module is incorporated into the backbone, leveraging joint spatial and channel attention mechanisms to improve the effectiveness and discriminative power of feature representations. The experimental results demonstrate that the improved model achieves a 4.5% increase in mean average precision compared with the original Faster-RCNN. Moreover, the proposed method exhibits superior detection accuracy, robustness, and adaptability compared with mainstream object detection models, indicating strong potential for engineering applications and industrial deployment.