Recently, two global smartphone giants unveiled their latest flagship products on the same day, featuring groundbreaking technologies such as AI innovations, camera advancements, health monitoring, audio improvements, and tri-fold screens. Whether inspired by Eastern wisdom or Western ingenuity, these innovations showcase diverse approaches to innovation while maintaining consistent quality standards.

Small Buttons, Big Technological Challenge

Among the many attention-grabbing features, the new button design has become a focal point. With its unique solid-state capacitive design and excellent tactile feedback, this innovation not only simulates the feel of physical buttons but also enables multiple functions such as slide-to-zoom and long-press focus lock. Each touch, press, and slide feels natural and smooth, creating a magical fingertip experience that truly delivers on the promise of one-touch control.

Such exquisite user experience demands near-flawless production quality. These buttons are made of high-quality sapphire crystal glass, measuring about 2 cm in length and thinner than a business card. The surface undergoes fine sandblasting and multi-layer silk-screen printing to perfectly match the device's body color, ensuring visual consistency and a premium feel. Each button must be impeccable, as even the slightest color difference or scratch could affect the tactile and visual experience, potentially leading to customer dissatisfaction, complaints, or returns.

A LUSTER technical manager explained, "Taking the inspection of small components like smartphone buttons as an example, the new glass technology sets extremely high standards for visual, AI, and automation capabilities, as well as their synergy."

Firstly, glass surface defects come in many forms, including scratches, discoloration, dirt, dents, and chipping. These defects can be incredibly small, with the tiniest being less than 0.01mm² - about the size of a fine sewing needle tip, invisible to the naked eye. The unique frosted texture also makes imaging extremely challenging. "To put it in perspective, this level of imaging precision is like finding a specific grain of sand in a basketball court-sized sandbox in just one second. Moreover, our AI algorithms need to analyze these images quickly and accurately to ensure precise quality control," he elaborated.

(Partial Defect Types)

Additionally, the inspection process for these delicate and thin glass structures requires robotic arms for loading, unloading, and cleaning. This process demands precision without damaging the thin sheets and must avoid displacement that could affect positioning accuracy and stability during transfer, potentially causing false alarms or equipment shutdowns. The difficulty of this operation is comparable to controlling a crane to wipe a lens in force 6 winds, requiring high-level design and integration capabilities.

Vision + AI: Accelerating Smart Manufacturing

LUSTER has been deeply involved in the consumer electronics industry since 2006, providing end-to-end quality inspection solutions for top global smartphone manufacturers. To date, they have inspected over 5 billion smartphone components, helping clients fulfill their commitment to delivering artisan-grade, zero-defect products to consumers.

Facing these challenges, LUSTER employs vision + AI technology to perform 360° high-precision surface inspections on glass buttons. This effectively addresses issues of discoloration and uneven sandblasting in glass material buttons, capable of identifying defects as small as 10 microns with a detection rate exceeding 98% and a false positive rate below 5%. Furthermore, the team integrated color detection with appearance inspection, overcoming the traditional need for multiple sets of equipment and inconsistent operations. This not only improved detection efficiency and accuracy but also reduced processing time on production lines.

Through micron-level precise control, combining the flexibility of robotic arms, the keen observation of vision systems, precise force control, and intelligent algorithmic decision-making, LUSTER's technical solution can complete over 60 inspections on each button in less than 0.5 seconds. One device's efficiency is equivalent to that of 150 manual operators, ensuring product quality consistency and reliability while meeting the demands of high-quality and high-speed production lines.

In the wave of technology, the pursuit of product quality is endless. Through vision + AI + automation technology, LUSTER helps improve the quality of consumer electronics products and drives technological progress in the industry. They continue to optimize their technological layout and innovate, further enhancing service levels and technical capabilities to help clients achieve quality improvement, efficiency increase, and cost reduction, ultimately bringing a more perfect user experience to consumers.