Performance Evaluation of a Decentralized Learning Architecture for PCB Defect Classification

Abstract

Printed circuit board (PCB) defect detection, which is an important task in industrial factories, receives great attention from both researchers and practitioners. To achieve high detection accuracy, the traditional training method requires data collection from multiple industrial factories. However, in practice, factories possess their own data and do not want to share the private data with other participants. Therefore, we introduce a decentralized learning method that makes use the knowledge of clients in the system. By leveraging the federated learning technique, a consensus global detection model can be produced while maintaining data privacy. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the detection performance under various learning methods: federated learning, centralized learning, and local learning. We also compare the detection performance of two well-known detection models: YOLOv5 and YOLOv8. The experimental results show that the federated learning based method yields better detection performance than the local learning.