Mandalia, Anil Dhirajlal.

The fundamental goal of a machine vision system in the inspection of an assembled printed circuit board is to locate the integrated circuit(IC) components. These components are then checked for their position and orientation with respect to a given position and orientation of the model and to detect deviations. To this end, a method based on a modified two-level correlation scheme is presented in this thesis. In the first level, Low-Level correlation, a modified two-stage template matching method is proposed. It makes use of the random search techniques, better known as the Monte Carlo method, to speed up the matching process on binarized version of the images. Due to the random search techniques, there is uncertainty involved in the location where the matches are found. In the second level, High-Level correlation, an evidence scheme based on the Dempster-Shafer formalism is presented to resolve the uncertainty. Experiment results performed on a printed circuit board containing mounted integrated components is also presented to demonstrate the validity of the techniques.