Multi-scale GAN with transformer for surface defect inspection of IC metal packages

•An AOI system is developed for surface defect inspection of IC metal packages.•Multi-scale GAN with transformer is designed to adaptively generate templates.•A multi-scale loss function is designed to ensure the network convergence.•Several multi-scale schemes are proposed for defect inspection at multiple scales.•Achieve inspection performance with error rate of 0.70% and omission rate of 0.57%.