Closed-loop Feedback Registration for Consecutive Images of Moving Flexible Targets
This addresses the challenge of in-line pattern inspection and metrology for deformable patterns in manufacturing, offering a domain-specific incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of accurately registering consecutive images of moving flexible targets in manufacturing, such as printed electronics, by proposing a closed-loop feedback algorithm that leverages temporal and spatial relationships, resulting in more matching point pairs, lower RMSE, and faster running time compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Advancement of imaging techniques enables consecutive image sequences to be acquired for quality monitoring of manufacturing production lines. Registration for these image sequences is essential for in-line pattern inspection and metrology, e.g., in the printing process of flexible electronics. However, conventional image registration algorithms cannot produce accurate results when the images contain many similar and deformable patterns in the manufacturing process. Such a failure originates from a fact that the conventional algorithms only use the spatial and pixel intensity information for registration. Considering the nature of temporal continuity and consecution of the product images, in this paper, we propose a closed-loop feedback registration algorithm for matching and stitching the deformable printed patterns on a moving flexible substrate. The algorithm leverages the temporal and spatial relationships of the consecutive images and the continuity of the image sequence for fast, accurate, and robust point matching. Our experimental results show that our algorithm can find more matching point pairs with a lower root mean squared error (RMSE) compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms while offering significant improvements to running time.