An Area-Based Prior Value Method for Detection of Micro Contamination in Hard Disk Drives

This paper presents a new area-based prior value technique for the improvement of automatic visual inspection in hard disk drive manufacturing. Micro-contaminations are detected on the air-bearing surface of the head gimbal assembly. The new area-based prior value technique uses the locations of contaminations that appear in the inspection area. The experimental results validate the efficiency of the new detection method on low-resolution images, as the proposed method yielded 93.1% accuracy.