Automated X-ray inspection

It uses X-rays as its source, instead of visible light, to automatically inspect features, which are typically hidden from view.

Automated X-ray inspection is used in a wide range of industries and applications, predominantly with two major goals: While AOI is mainly associated with electronics manufacturing (due to widespread use in printed circuit board manufacturing), AXI has a much wider range of applications.

With the advancement of image processing software the number applications for automated x-ray inspection is huge and constantly growing.

But with wider adoption of the technology, prices came down significantly and opened automated x-ray inspection up to a much wider field- partially fueled again by safety aspects (e.g. detection of metal, glass or other materials in processed food) or to increase yield and optimize processing (e.g. detection of size and location of holes in cheese to optimize slicing patterns).

Recently, automated methods have been developed for X-ray inspection of food passing by on a conveyor belt.

[5][6][7] The increasing usage of ICs (integrated circuits) with packages such as BGAs (ball grid array) where the connections are underneath the chip and not visible, means that ordinary optical inspection is impossible.

Techniques such as Tomosynthesis are often used to filter out background components by first creating a 3D model from multiple X-ray images taken from different angles.