Joining Quality Inspection
Ensuring Perfect Joints and Connections
Our cameras ensure the integrity and quality of critical joining processes like welding and soldering - crucial for structural safety, electrical performance, and long-term reliability.
Key Applications
Welding Inspection (Automotive Body-side)
The OV20i vision system inspects welds for automotive suppliers, ensuring weld quality is up to par and completely replacing previous manual inspections that required significant labor. It addresses challenges faced by prior systems, such as downtime issues, false positives, and inconsistencies due to changing lighting conditions. With the OV20i, users can easily set up inspections for a high number of regions of interest - for example, 135 welds - achieving reliable and precise results quickly, with the model working reliably within a week.
Safety Critical Welds Inspection
For a major automotive supplier, the OV20i addresses the struggle to consistently and accurately detect faulty safety critical welds, which previously relied on expensive manual inspections by third-party suppliers due to the variety of issues and high quality bar. With only 11 training images and 3 failure cases, Overview AI implemented a classifier algorithm to detect pass vs. failed welds, achieving 100% accuracy across all samples before production and significantly reducing inspection costs.
Electronic Chip Soldering Defect Detection
A major electronic chip manufacturer utilized Overview AI to resolve issues with faulty chips leaving their lines due to minor soldering defects, which were difficult to identify visually and evaded existing systems due to glare and variability in defect location. The AI vision system identified soldering defects with only a handful of images across multiple regions of interest. It also integrated with their PLC and built Node-Red logic to pause inspection lines and provide x-y coordinates of faults for easier identification and corrective action.
Laser Soldering Inspection
Our vision system inspects laser soldering processes to ensure precise and reliable joints. Traditional solder inspection methods struggled with subtle defects such as tin balls, solder bridging, tin tips, solder deviation, low overlap, insufficient solder, and false welding - all of which can compromise product reliability and safety. By leveraging Overview AI's system, users can train models with only a small set of examples to robustly detect all common soldering issues, even under challenging conditions like glare and variable joint geometries. The system integrates seamlessly with existing line controls, providing real-time defect detection and precise localization, enabling immediate corrective action while reducing rework and preventing defective parts from reaching customers.
Why Manufacturers Choose Overview AI
Purpose-built for critical weld and solder inspection where safety is non-negotiable.
Safety-Critical Accuracy
100% weld accuracy with only 11 training images. Replaces costly third-party manual inspections entirely.
Precise Localization
X-Y coordinates of every fault for immediate corrective action. Integrates with PLC to pause lines automatically.
Production in 1 Week
Set up 135+ weld inspection regions and go from pilot to reliable production in under a week.
From Install to Production in Hours
No months-long integrations. No dedicated vision specialists. Just fast, accurate inspection.
Install & Configure
Mount the camera, connect to your network via any browser - no software installs, no license keys. Full system operational in under 2 hours.
Train with Real Images
Capture as few as 5 production images, label defects in-browser, and train a production-grade model. Built-in augmentation generates 10x more training data automatically.
Deploy & Retrain
Push the model to the camera - no export steps, no IT tickets. Retrain on new edge cases from the production floor in under 1 hour, zero downtime.
Built for the Factory Floor
Enterprise-grade hardware and software designed for 24/7 industrial operation.
NVIDIA-powered on-device processing. No cloud dependency.
Store weeks of production data directly on each camera.
EtherNet/IP, Profinet, Modbus TCP - no middleware needed.
ISO 9001, ISO 27001 certified.
Node-RED on Every Camera
Visual programming for PLC triggers, reject mechanisms, data logging, and MES/ERP integration via REST APIs.
Custom Dashboards
Build operator, engineer, and management views with standard HTML/CSS/JS. Access from any browser on the network.
Haystack Discovery
Surface unknown defects and outliers automatically. Retrain to catch them - no vendor involvement required.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Which joint defects have a visual signature?
More than people assume. Porosity, undercut, insufficient or excess material, misalignment, cold joints, incomplete crimps, and adhesive gaps all change how the joint looks. What vision sees is the surface rather than the internal structure, so it is inference about strength rather than a direct measurement of it. That turns out to be useful anyway, because the visual signature usually changes before the joint actually starts failing, which makes this an early warning that the process has drifted.
Is vision a replacement for pull testing?
No, and it is worth being clear about that. Pull and peel testing measures the property you actually care about, and it is destructive, which is why it is done on samples. Vision inspects every unit but infers from appearance. The two fit together: vision catches the joints that visibly departed from the process window, and destructive testing on samples confirms the window is still the right one. Using vision to reduce sampling frequency is reasonable. Using it to eliminate destructive testing is not.
Why do joints need more than one camera angle so often?
Because the feature you need to see sits in a recess. A fillet or a seam is geometry with depth, and a single view straight down looks along the feature rather than across it, so the thing that distinguishes good from bad is foreshortened or shadowed. A second angle that looks across the joint frequently does more for accuracy than any change to the algorithm. Getting light into the recess without throwing a specular highlight straight back is the related problem.
Ready to Automate Weld & Solder Inspection?
See how Overview AI vision deployments drive real results in days, not months.