Printed circuit board solder joint quality inspection based on lightweight classification network

Solder joint quality inspection is a crucial step in the qualification inspection of printed circuit board (PCB) components, and efficient and accurate inspection methods will greatly improve its production efficiency. In this paper, we propose a PCB solder joint quality detection algorithm based on a lightweight classification network. First, the Select Joint segmentation method was used to obtain the solder joint information, and colour space conversion was used to locate the solder joint. The mask method, contour detection, and box line method were combined to complete the extraction of solder joint information. Then, by combining the respective characteristics of convolutional neural network and Transformer and introducing Cross‐covariance attention to reduce the computational complexity and resource consumption of the model and evenly distribute the global view mutual information in the whole training process, a new lightweight network model MobileXT is proposed to complete defect classification. Only 16.4% of the Vision Transformer computing resources used in this model can achieve an average accuracy improvement of 31%. Additionally, the network is trained and validated using a dataset of 1804 solder joint images constructed from 93 PCB images and two external datasets to evaluate MobileXT performance. The proposed method achieves more efficient localization of the solder joint information and more accurate classification of weld joint defects, and the lightweight model design is more appropriate for industrial edge device deployments.