IPC White Paper on AI Inspection

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the theory and development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. This includes visual perception and pattern recognition, speech recognition, decision-making, natural language processing, and translation. Machine learning is the branch of AI in which computers learn from data without human assistance. Deep learning is a type of machine learning that trains a computer to perform human-like tasks such as recognizing speech, identifying images, or making predictions.

In recent years, AI has rapidly emerged in areas such as computer vision, generative AI with large language models, etc. AI in computer vision has found relevant use cases in quality inspection. Neural network-based deep learning models have demonstrated high accuracy in object detection and classification in digital image processing. As AI models show great potential to replace human cognition in the quality inspection process through object detection and classification, AI-assisted quality inspection promises to further automate these processes.

While this white paper focuses on the application of Computer vision AI for automating inspection (i.e., applying AI for pattern recognition on inspection images), the rapidly growing availability and maturity of generative AI present future possibilities in generating inspection criteria.