NOVEL METHOD FOR THE ANALYSIS OF PRINTED CIRCUIT IMAGES.

To keep pace with the trend towards increased circuit integration, printed circuit patterns are becoming denser and more complex. A variety of automated visual inspection methods to detect circuit defects during manufacturing have been proposed. This paper describes a method that is a synthesis of the reference-comparison and the generic property approaches that exploits their respective strengths and overcomes their respective weaknesses, It is based on the observation that the local geometric and global topological correctness of a printed circuit can be inferred from the correctness of simplified, skeletal versions of the circuit in a test image. These operations can be realized using simple processing elements which are well suited for implementation in hardware.