Patent ID: 7508973

Claim:
A method of inspecting defects, comprising: a step of assigning an inspection recipe; a step of inspecting a sample using the inspection recipe assigned; and a step of outputting results of the inspection; wherein said step of assigning an inspection recipe further includes: an image signal acquisition step in which images of a sample are each sequentially acquired under a plurality of sets of image acquisition conditions differing from each other and a plurality of image signals each different in image acquisition conditions are sequentially acquired; and wherein said step of inspecting the sample further includes: a displaying step for displaying on a display the plurality of sequential acquired image signals together with information of the image acquisition conditions and indexes which indicate appropriateness of the image signals for detecting defects; an image acquisition conditions determination step for determining the image acquisition condition based upon the displayed images and the displayed indexes; an image processing step for processing the images acquired under the determined image acquisition conditions by varying defect detection conditions; a defect detection conditions determination step for determining the defect detection conditions by using information from images processed at the image processing step; and a defect detection step in which, from each of the plurality of image signals sequentially acquired under different sets of image acquisition conditions in said image signal acquisition step, defect candidates are detected for each of the plurality of sets of image acquisition conditions, and position information of the defect candidates detected is acquired.