UniPCB: A Generation-Assisted Vision-Based Measurement Framework for PCB Defect Inspection

Abstract

Automated optical inspection (AOI) is a vision-based instrumentation process that detects and localizes physical defects on printed circuit boards (PCBs) from optically acquired images. Its reliability is often limited by scarce and class-imbalanced defect observations and by insufficient representation of small, low-contrast defects against dense circuit patterns. We propose UniPCB, a generation-assisted PCB inspection framework that combines controlled defect synthesis with task-specific detection. The generation branch derives heterogeneous edge, relative pseudo-depth, and text conditions from PCB images. A ScaleEncoder embeds the conditions at four U-Net resolutions, while a Condition Modulation block performs FiLM-style spatially adaptive fusion. The detection branch introduces an Inverted Residual Shift Attention block for joint global-local modeling and a Cross-level Complementary Fusion block for selective hierarchical feature integration. The generated images augment the detector training data and improve defect coverage without changing the online inspection path. Experiments using the corrected annotations of DsPCBSD+ yield an [email protected] of 98.0% and an [email protected]:0.95 of 61.8%. Under the same generation-augmented training setting, these values exceed those of the RT-DETR baseline by 2.1 and 1.7 percentage points, respectively. The generation branch obtains an FID of 129.61 and an SSIM of 0.619. These results indicate the potential of structured synthetic data and PCB-oriented feature modeling for improving vision-based defect inspection. Code is available at https://github.com/House-yuyu/UniPCB.