A neural network approach for non-contact defect inspection of flat panel displays

This paper proposes a neural network-based approach for the inspection of electrical defects on thin film transistor lines of flat panel displays. The inspection is performed on digitized waveform data of voltage signals that are captured by a capacitor-based non-contact sensor by scanning over thin film transistor lines on the surface of the mother glass of flat panels. The sudden deep falls (open circuits) or sharp rises (short circuits) on the captured noisy waveform are classified and detected by employing a four-layer feed-forward neural network with two hidden layers. The topology of the network comprises an input layer with two units, two hidden layers with two and three units, and an output layer with one unit; a standard sigmoid function as the activation function for each unit. The network is trained with a fast adaptive back-propagation algorithm to find an optimal set of associated weights of neurons by feeding a known set of input data. The ambiguity of the threshold definition does not arise in this method because it uses only local features of waveform data at and around selected candidate points as inputs to the network, unlike the existing thresholding-based method, which is inherently prone to missed detections and false detections. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.