Exploring "Many in Few" and "Few in Many" Properties in Long-Tailed, Highly-Imbalanced IC Defect Classification
This work addresses the problem of improving defect classification accuracy in the IC manufacturing industry, where high yield-rate requirements and complex data distributions make existing methods ineffective, representing an incremental advancement with domain-specific impact.
The paper tackles the challenge of classifying IC defects in real-world, highly imbalanced datasets by introducing the IC-Defect-14 dataset and proposing ReCAME-Net, which outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on this dataset while maintaining competitive performance on general public datasets.
Despite significant advancements in deep classification techniques and in-lab automatic optical inspection models for long-tailed or highly imbalanced data, applying these approaches to real-world IC defect classification tasks remains challenging. This difficulty stems from two primary factors. First, real-world conditions, such as the high yield-rate requirements in the IC industry, result in data distributions that are far more skewed than those found in general public imbalanced datasets. Consequently, classifiers designed for open imbalanced datasets often fail to perform effectively in real-world scenarios. Second, real-world samples exhibit a mix of class-specific attributes and class-agnostic, domain-related features. This complexity adds significant difficulty to the classification process, particularly for highly imbalanced datasets. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the IC-Defect-14 dataset, a large, highly imbalanced IC defect image dataset sourced from AOI systems deployed in real-world IC production lines. This dataset is characterized by its unique "intra-class clusters" property, which presents two major challenges: large intra-class diversity and high inter-class similarity. These characteristics, rarely found simultaneously in existing public datasets, significantly degrade the performance of current state-of-the-art classifiers for highly imbalanced data. To tackle this challenge, we propose ReCAME-Net, which follows a multi-expert classifier framework and integrates a regional channel attention module, metric learning losses, a hard category mining strategy, and a knowledge distillation procedure. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that ReCAME-Net outperforms previous state-of-the-art models on the IC-Defect-14 dataset while maintaining comparable performance and competitiveness on general public datasets.