Automatic inspection system of LED chip using two-stages back-propagation neural network

This study proposed an automatic LED defect detection system to investigate the defects of LED chips. Such defects include fragment chips, scratch marks and remained gold on the pad area, scratch marks on the luminous zone, and missing luminous zone respectively. The system was based on positioning and image acquisition, appearance feature recognition, and defect classification. The normalized correlation coefficient method was used to locate the chip and acquire its image, the K-means clustering method was used to distinguish the appearance, pad area, and luminous zone of chips. In terms of pad area detection, histogram equalization was used to enhance the pad image contrast, and statistical threshold selection and morphological closing were applied to modify the impure points in the pad. Feature values of the pad area were then calculated. The optimal statistical threshold separated the luminous zone and background from the substrate. After processed with closing operation, features of the luminous zone were extracted. Finally, features of each part were clarified by an efficient two-step back-propagation neural network, where a designed appearance classifier and an internal structure classifier were used for recognition. From experiments, total recognition rate of this study achieved 97.83 %, proving that the detection method proposed by this study can efficiently detect LED chip defects.