Patent ID: 6711304
Filing Date: 2004-03-23
Classification: G06K,G06T

Abstract:
An apparatus, comprising:means for capturing an image of at least a portion of a semiconductor substrate containing at least one integrated circuit disposed in an image processing system; means for performing a filtering operation on the image to produce a filtered image containing enhanced edge information for the image; means for rotating the filtered image by an incremental angle to produce a rotated image; means for projecting the rotated image onto an x-axis and y-axis defined relative to the image to form projected pixels image from an intersection of the x-axis and the y-axis with the rotated image; means for computing a score for a projection of the rotated image, the score corresponding to a mathematical representation of pixel values for the projected pixels; means for performing the rotating, the projecting and the computing for subsequent rotated images, each rotated image of the subsequent rotated images being rotated by a multiple of the incremental angle; and means for determining a peak score from the score for the rotated image projection and subsequent scores for the subsequent rotated image projections.