Patent ID: 7664608

Claim:
A defect inspection method comprising the steps of: acquiring images of a sample whose surface is formed with patterns by sequentially shooting inspection regions including a pattern; correcting, as pre-processing, the images taken by the sequential shooting; generating inspection images and reference images sequentially from the corrected images; extracting defect candidates on the sample using a set or sets of an inspection image and a reference image; and determining defects from the extracted defect candidates and classifying the defects, wherein the defect candidate extracting step comprises the substeps of: calculating a correction value for positioning the inspection image and the reference image of the same set; positioning the inspection image and the reference image with respect to each other on the basis of the calculated correction value; and extracting defect candidates by comparing the positioned inspection image and reference image using plural computing devices in such a manner that pieces of processing are performed in parallel by the plural computing devices, the plural computation processing devices and a parent computing device being connected to each other by a bidirectional data communication bus.