BoardVision: Deployment-ready and Robust Motherboard Defect Detection with YOLO+Faster-RCNN Ensemble

Abstract

Motherboard defect detection is critical for ensuring reliability in high-volume electronics manufacturing. While prior research in PCB inspection has largely targeted bare-board or trace-level defects, assembly-level inspection of full motherboards inspection remains underexplored. In this work, we present BoardVision, a reproducible framework for detecting assembly-level defects such as missing screws, loose fan wiring, and surface scratches. We benchmark two representative detectors - YOLOv7 and Faster R-CNN, under controlled conditions on the MiracleFactory motherboard dataset, providing the first systematic comparison in this domain. To mitigate the limitations of single models, where YOLO excels in precision but underperforms in recall and Faster R-CNN shows the reverse, we propose a lightweight ensemble, Confidence-Temporal Voting (CTV Voter), that balances precision and recall through interpretable rules. We further evaluate robustness under realistic perturbations including sharpness, brightness, and orientation changes, highlighting stability challenges often overlooked in motherboard defect detection. Finally, we release a deployable GUI-driven inspection tool that bridges research evaluation with operator usability. Together, these contributions demonstrate how computer vision techniques can transition from benchmark results to practical quality assurance for assembly-level motherboard manufacturing.