Cognitive Visual Inspection Service for LCD Manufacturing Industry

With the rapid growth of display devices, quality inspection via machine vision technology has become increasingly important for flat-panel displays (FPD) industry. This paper discloses a novel visual inspection system for liquid crystal display (LCD), which is currently a dominant type in the FPD industry. The system is based on two cornerstones: robust/high-performance defect recognition model and cognitive visual inspection service architecture. A hybrid application of conventional computer vision technique and the latest deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) leads to an integrated defect detection, classification and impact evaluation model that can be economically trained with only image-level class annotations to achieve a high inspection accuracy. In addition, the properly trained model is robust to the variation of the image quality, significantly alleviating the dependency between the model prediction performance and the image acquisition environment. This in turn justifies the decoupling of the defect recognition functions from the front-end device to the back-end service, motivating the design and realization of the cognitive visual inspection service architecture. Empirical case study is performed on a large-scale real-world LCD dataset from a manufacturing line with different layers and products, which shows the promising utility of our system, which has been deployed in a real-world LCD manufacturing line from a major player in the world.