Semi-Supervised Defect Detection Method with Data-Expanding Strategy for PCB Quality Inspection

Printed circuit board (PCB) defect detection plays a crucial role in PCB production, and the popular methods are based on deep learning and require large-scale datasets with high-level ground-truth labels, in which it is time-consuming and costly to label these datasets. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods, which reduce the need for labeled samples by leveraging unlabeled samples, can address this problem well. However, for PCB defects, the detection accuracy on small numbers of labeled samples still needs to be improved because the number of labeled samples is small, and the training process will be disturbed by the unlabeled samples. To overcome this problem, this paper proposed a semi-supervised defect detection method with a data-expanding strategy (DE-SSD). The proposed DE-SSD uses both the labeled and unlabeled samples, which can reduce the cost of data labeling, and a batch-adding strategy (BA-SSL) is introduced to leverage the unlabeled data with less disturbance. Moreover, a data-expanding (DE) strategy is proposed to use the labeled samples from other datasets to expand the target dataset, which can also prevent the disturbance by the unlabeled samples. Based on the improvements, the proposed DE-SSD can achieve competitive results for PCB defects with fewer labeled samples. The experimental results on DeepPCB indicate that the proposed DE-SSD achieves state-of-the-art performance, which is improved by 4.7 mAP at least compared with the previous methods.