Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) are critical components in modern electronics, which require stringent quality control to ensure proper functionality. However, the detection of defects in small-scale PCBs images poses significant challenges as a result of the low resolution of the captured images, leading to potential confusion between defects and noise. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel framework, named ESRPCB (edgeguided super-resolution for PCBs defect detection), which combines edgeguided super-resolution with ensemble learning to enhance PCBs defect detection. The framework leverages the edge information to guide the EDSR (Enhanced Deep Super-Resolution) model with a novel ResCat (Residual Concatenation) structure, enabling it to reconstruct high-resolution images from small PCBs inputs. By incorporating edge features, the super-resolution process preserves critical structural details, ensuring that tiny defects remain distinguishable in the enhanced image. Following this, a multi-modal defect detection model employs ensemble learning to analyze the super-resolved

This study proposes an advanced method for surface defect detection in printed circuit boards (PCBs) using an improved YOLOv11 model enhanced with a generative adversarial network (GAN). The approach focuses on identifying six common defect types: missing hole, rat bite, open circuit, short circuit, burr, and virtual welding. By employing GAN to generate synthetic defect images, the dataset is augmented with diverse and realistic patterns, improving the model's ability to generalize, particularly for complex and infrequent defects like burrs. The enhanced YOLOv11 model is evaluated on a PCB defect dataset, demonstrating significant improvements in accuracy, recall, and robustness, especially when dealing with defects in complex environments or small targets. This research contributes to the broader field of electronic design automation (EDA), where efficient defect detection is a crucial step in ensuring high-quality PCB manufacturing. By integrating advanced deep learning techniques, this approach enhances the automation and precision of defect detection, reducing reliance on manual inspection and accelerating design-to-production workflows. The findings underscore the importance of incorporating GAN-based data augmentation and optimized detection architectures in EDA processes, providing valuable insights for improving reliability and efficiency in PCB defect detection within industrial applications.

The quality control of printed circuit boards (PCBs) is paramount in advancing electronic device technology. While numerous machine learning methodologies have been utilized to augment defect detection efficiency and accuracy, previous studies have predominantly focused on optimizing individual models for specific defect types, often overlooking the potential synergies between different approaches. This paper introduces a comprehensive inspection framework leveraging an ensemble learning strategy to address this gap. Initially, we utilize four distinct PCB defect detection models utilizing state-of-the-art methods: EfficientDet, MobileNet SSDv2, Faster RCNN, and YOLOv5. Each method is capable of identifying PCB defects independently. Subsequently, we integrate these models into an ensemble learning framework to enhance detection performance. A comparative analysis reveals that our ensemble learning framework significantly outperforms individual methods, achieving a 95% accuracy in detecting diverse PCB defects. These findings underscore the efficacy of our proposed ensemble learning framework in enhancing PCB quality control processes.

With the rapid growth of the PCB manufacturing industry, there is an increasing demand for computer vision inspection to detect defects during production. Improving the accuracy and generalization of PCB defect detection models remains a significant challenge. This paper proposes a high-precision, robust, and real-time end-to-end method for PCB defect detection based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Traditional methods often suffer from low accuracy and limited applicability. We propose a novel approach combining YOLOv5 and multiscale modules for hierarchical residual-like connections. In PCB defect detection, noise can confuse the background and small targets. The YOLOv5 model provides a strong foundation with its real-time processing and accurate object detection capabilities. The multi-scale module extends traditional approaches by incorporating hierarchical residual-like connections within a single block, enabling multiscale feature extraction. This plug-and-play module significantly enhances performance by extracting features at multiple scales and levels, which are useful for identifying defects of varying sizes and complexities. Our multi-scale architecture integrates feature extraction, defect localization, and classification into a unified network. Experiments on a large-scale PCB dataset demonstrate significant improvements in precision, recall, and F1-score compared to existing methods. This work advances computer vision inspection for PCB defect detection, providing a reliable solution for high-precision, robust, real-time, and domain-adaptive defect detection in the PCB manufacturing industry.