Improved YOLOv3 detection method for PCB plug-in solder joint defects based on ordered probability density weighting and attention mechanism

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) is the heart component of electronic products, and its defect detection is the basic requirement of PCB quality control in the production process. Traditional visual detection methods need artificial design features, so their detection accuracy is poor, and the rate of missed and false detection is high. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes an improved YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once) detection method for PCB plug-in solder spot defects based on the combination of the ordered probability density weighting and the attention mechanism. First, in order to obtain a higher priority priori box, the ordered probability density weighting (OWA) method is used to optimize the multiple sets of a priori boxes generated by K-means. Then, to get more effective feature information, the Squeeze-and-Excitation mechanism (SE) is added to the backbone network. In the feature detection network, the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) attention mechanism is joined, at the same time in the inspection network output layer three layer feature are fusions. Finally, in order to accelerate the convergence speed of model and improve the accuracy of the model, the network loss function was improved by using the generalized joint generalized intersection over union (GIoU), and the COCO data model was applied to PCB solder spot defect training by transfer learning method. After testing, the average detection accuracy of improved network is improved from 84.35% to 96.69%, and the improved network has better convergence than the original network. The study shows that the improved method based on YOLOv3 is more suitable for industrial application of PCB plug-in solder spot defect detection.