Logo Classification and Data Augmentation Techniques for PCB Assurance and Counterfeit Detection

Abstract This paper evaluates several approaches for automating the identification and classification of logos on printed circuit boards (PCBs) and ICs. It assesses machine learning and computer vision techniques as well as neural network algorithms. It explains how the authors created a representative dataset for machine learning by collecting variants of logos from PCBs and by applying data augmentation techniques. Besides addressing the challenges of image classification, the paper presents the results of experiments using Random Forest classifiers, Bag of Visual Words (BoVW) based on SIFT and ORB Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCN), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures. It also discusses edge cases where the algorithms are prone to fail and where potential opportunities exist for future work in PCB logo identification, component authentication, and counterfeit detection. The code for the algorithms along with the dataset incorporating 18 classes of logos and more than 14,000 images is available at this link: https://www.trusthub.org/#/data.