PCB-MC: Missing Component Analysis in Printed Circuit Boards

Abstract: Detecting missing components on printed circuit boards (PCBs) differs fundamentally from conventional object detection, as the model must localize components that are not present. We introduce PCB-MC, a curated dataset for missing component detection with footprint level annotations built on top of the RF100 dataset. The dataset contains 197 distinct board types, each corresponding to a unique PCB design, with multiple augmented samples per type. We also provide benchmark results on PCB-MC by evaluating a diverse set of supervised and unsupervised methods. To ensure fair evaluation, we propose board type aware cross validation splits that prevent layout leakage between training and test sets. Supervised models showcase high false negative rates on unseen board designs, and unsupervised anomaly detection methods fail entirely due to the lack of spatial alignment with a board specific reference. These results confirm that missing component detection on diverse PCB layouts remains an open challenge. We release PCB-MC and all training protocols to support reproducible research on structural absence detection in industrial inspection.