Patent ID: 7487491

Claim:
A device for correcting a pattern image by use of an inspection reference pattern image of a workpiece being tested and a pattern image under test, said device comprising: an equation generation unit operative to generate by linear predictive modeling a set of simultaneous equations for the reference pattern image and the under-test pattern image; a parameter generation unit operative to solve the equations to thereby obtain more than one model parameter; a parameter centroid calculation unit operative to obtain a centroid position of the model parameter; a sub-pixel interpolation computing unit operative to perform interpolation against the reference pattern image and the test pattern image to thereby generate a sub-pixel interpolated image; a sub-pixel shift amount generation unit operative to use the sub-pixel interpolated image to obtain a sub-pixel shift amount for minimization of a deviation error in position between the reference pattern image and the test pattern image; an error comparison unit operative to compare a difference between the centroid position of the model parameter and the sub-pixel shift amount to a threshold; a corrected pattern image generation unit operative to use the model parameter to generate a corrected pattern image based on the linear predictive modeling; and an interpolated image correction unit operative to generate an interpolated corrected image based on interpolation processing.