US Patent Issued to Hitachi High-Tech on July 7 for "Defect inspection apparatus" (Japanese Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,676,284, issued on July 7, was assigned to Hitachi High-Tech Corp. (Tokyo).

"Defect inspection apparatus" was invented by Yasuhiro Yoshida (Tokyo), Masayoshi Ishikawa (Tokyo), Toshinori Yamauchi (Tokyo), Kosuke Fukuda (Tokyo) and Hiroyuki Shindo (Tokyo).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A defect inspection apparatus includes: a feature value calculation unit calculating a feature value based on a captured image of a sample; an image information reduction unit generating a latent variable by reducing an information quantity of the feature value; a statistic value estimation unit estimating an image statistic value that can be taken by a normal...