Patent ID: 7359544

Claim:
A method of setting up an automatic defect classifier system for classifying semiconductor defects, the method comprising: (a) providing defect image data for a plurality of defects; (b) selecting one or more first representative sets of defects from the defects so as to optimize manual classification; (c) presenting each first representative set of defects and not the defects which are not part of the one or more first representative sets to a user for manual classification, wherein the defects which are not part of the one or more first representative sets are defined as non-reviewed defects; (d) after the user manually classifies each first representative set of defects so as to define a seed set, iteratively classifying the non-reviewed defects into a plurality of probable classes based on the seed set and iteratively presenting a second representative set of defects for each probable class which have a lowest confidence level to the user for possible reclassification, wherein the operations of iteratively classifying and iteratively presenting continue to be repeated without human intervention until the user's manual reclassification of any defect in any probable class does not result in such reclassified defect being reclassified into a different class than its previous probable class.