Automatic optical phase identification of microdrill bits using Active Shape Models

Inspection of microdrill bits is very important for quality control in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) production. Traditional methods mainly focus on geometric defects inspection. This paper proposes an automatic optical inspection scheme which can not only be used for geometric defects inspection but also identify the phase of microdrill bits. Our approaches employ active shape models (ASM) technique to model the shape of the cutting plane in the acquired microdrill bit image, and then we classify microdrill bits in the eigenshape space using model parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for automatic inspection of microdrill bits in Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing.