Advanced Methods for the Optical Quality Assurance of Silicon Sensors

We describe a setup for optical quality assurance of silicon microstrip sensors. Pattern recognition algorithms were developed to analyze microscopic scans of the sensors for defects. It is shown that the software has a recognition and classification rate of >~90% for defects like scratches, shorts, broken metal lines etc. We have demonstrated that advanced image processing based on neural network techniques is able to further improve the recognition and defect classification rate.