Inspiration

Manual PCB inspection is quite slow and error-prone. I wanted to automate quality control using computer vision to make electronics manufacturing more efficient.

What it does

Upload a PCB image and instantly identify 6 common defect types with 84.4% accuracy, providing confidence scores for each prediction.

How I built it

  • Converted YOLO bounding box annotations to cropped defect images
  • Trained a streamlined CNN with 3 convolutional layers and batch normalization
  • Deployed as a Flask web application with real-time image processing

Challenges I ran into

Complex CNN architectures overfitted badly (20% accuracy). The breakthrough came from simplifying the model and adding strategic regularization.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

Achieving 84.4% validation accuracy and deploying a fully functional web application that provides instant, usable results.

What I learned

For specialized tasks like small defect detection, simpler architectures with proper regularization outperform complex models. Sometimes less really is more.

What's next for PCB Defect Detection

Improving performance on Missing Hole and Spur defect classes (currently 63-71% accuracy) by collecting more targeted training data and implementing data augmentation specific to these challenging defects.

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