Patent ID: 8545623

Claim:
A method for growing a monocrystalline silicon ingot from silicon melt according to the CZ process, comprising: capturing an image of the silicon ingot growing from the silicon melt; processing the captured image to obtain image data which comprises attributes of pixels forming at least a contour of an interface between the growing silicon ingot and the silicon melt, wherein the attributes of the pixels comprise at least one of locations of the pixels and intensities of the pixels; statistically analyzing the image data to derive parameters of an equation statistically simulating the contour of the interface, wherein one of the parameters relates to a diameter of the silicon ingot; and conducting the statistical analysis on the image data in which each pixel is weighted by a weight factor which is a function of the attributes of said each pixel, and thereby renewing the parameters, wherein processing the captured image comprises: dilating the captured image; applying high-pass filtering to subtract a background from the captured image to signify local intensity maxima in the captured image; and applying ROI masking to extract an area of interest from the captured image.