• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
• /
• v.9B no.2
• /
• pp.245-254
• /
• 2002

IC package marking inspection system using machine vision locates and identifies the target elements from input image, and decides the quality of marking by comparing the extracted target elements with the standard patterns. This paper proposes an adaptive multi-level thresholding (AMLT) method which is suitable for a series of operations such as locating the target IC package, extracting the characters, and detecting the Pinl dimple. It also proposes a dynamic matching unit selection (DMUS) method which is robust to noises as well as effective to catch out the local marking errors. The main idea of the AMLT method is to restrict the inputs of Otsu's thresholding algorithm within a specified area and a partial range of gray values. Doing so, it can adapt to the specific domain. The DMUS method dynamically selects the matching unit according to the result of character extraction and layout analysis. Therefore, in spite of the various erroneous situation occurred in the process of character extraction and layout analysis, it can select minimal matching unit in any environment. In an experiment with 280 IC package images of eight types, the correct extracting rate of IC package and Pinl dimple was 100% and the correct decision rate of marking quality was 98.8%. This result shows that the proposed methods are effective to IC package marking inspection.