Combination of multiple classifiers for post-placement quality inspection of components: A comparative study

Current trends in the electronics industry are towards miniaturization of components, denser packing of printed-circuit boards and highly automated assembly lines. The technology of Surface Mounted Devices (SMD) facilitates this trend, thus explaining the substantial increase in the use of its various versions. Nevertheless, dense packaging requires increased accuracy in the placement and efficient inspection of components in order to ensure high reliability in manufacturing. This paper presents fusion methods of multiple classifiers for improving the classification of individual components in terms of positioning accuracy through computer vision inspection. Multiple classifier combination is a technique that combines the decisions of different classifiers as to reduce the variance of estimation errors and improve the overall classification accuracy. Combining the power of the primary classifiers through multi-modular architectures improves the classification results and contributes to the robustness of the overall inspection system.