Chip on film (COF) is a special packaging technology to pack integrated circuits in a flexible carrier tape. Chips packed with COF are primarily used in the display industry. Reel editing is a critical step in COF quality control to remove sections of congregating NG (not good) chips from a reel. Today, COF manufactures hire workers to count consecutive NG chips in a rolling reel with naked eyes. When the count is greater than a preset number, the corresponding section is removed. A novel method using object detection and object tracking is proposed to solve this problem. Object detection techniques including convolutional neural network (CNN), template matching (TM), and scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) were used to detect NG marks, and object tracking was used to track them with IDs so that congregating NG chips could be counted reliably. Using simulation videos similar to worksite scenes, experiments show that both CNN and TM detectors could solve the reel editing problem, while SIFT detectors failed. Furthermore, TM is better than CNN by yielding a real time solution.
Object Tracking with a Novel Visual-Thermal Sensor Fusion Method in Template Matching