Several methods for PCB pattern inspection have been tried to detect tine defects in pad contours, but their low detection accuracy results from pattern variations originating from etching, printing and handling processes. The adaptive inspection algorithm has been newly proposed to extract minute defects based on movable segments. With gerber master images of PCB, vertex extractions of a pad boundary are made and then a lot of segments are constructed in master data. The pad boundary is composed of segment units. The proposed method moves these segments to optimal directions of a pad boundary and so adaptively matches segments to pad contours of inspected images, irrespectively of various pattern variations. It makes a fast, accurate and reliable inspection of PCB patterns. Its performances are also evaluated with several images.
