Due to the impact of the production environment, there may be quality issues on the surface of printed circuit boards (PCBs), which could result in significant economic losses during the application process. As a result, PCB surface defect detection has become an essential step for managing PCB production quality. With the continuous advancement of PCB production technology, defects on PCBs now exhibit characteristics such as small areas and diverse styles. Utilizing global information plays a crucial role in detecting these small and variable defects. To address this challenge, we propose a novel defect detection framework named Defect Detection TRansformer (DDTR), which combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer architectures. In the backbone, we employ the Residual Swin Transformer (ResSwinT) to extract both local detail information using ResNet and global dependency information through the Swin Transformer. This approach allows us to capture multi-scale features and enhance feature expression capabilities.In the neck of the network, we introduce spatial and channel multi-head self-attention (SCSA), enabling the network to focus on advantageous features in different dimensions. Moving to the head, we employ multiple cascaded detectors and classifiers to further improve defect detection accuracy. We conducted extensive experiments on the PKU-Market-PCB and DeepPCB datasets. Comparing our proposed DDTR framework with existing common methods, we achieved the highest F1-score and produced the most informative visualization results. Lastly, ablation experiments were performed to demonstrate the feasibility of individual modules within the DDTR framework. These experiments confirmed the effectiveness and contributions of our approach.

Automatic defect detection is a key but challenging technology for managing printed circuit board (PCB) production quality. In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have attracted considerable attention for PCB defect detection. However, due to the complexity, diversity, and small‐scale characteristics of defects, it remains a challenge. In this letter, a single‐shot detector (SSD)‐based defects detection method is proposed. This method treats the test and template image as a single image with two channels. In order to reduce the information loss caused by the traditional pooling methods, a new pooling method combining three types of pooling features is proposed. To further improve the detection performance, the channel attention (CA) mechanism is introduced into the detection network. Our proposed method achieves 99.64% mean average precision (mAP) on the DeepPCB dataset, which surpasses the state‐of‐the‐art methods.