Method and apparatus for acquiring an image for inspection of a flat panel display

摘要

There are provided a method and an apparatus for acquiring an image for inspection of a flat panel display which can be advantageously used in inspecting any pixel defect of a flat panel display with high accuracy. An image of light and darkness of the flat panel display picked up by a solid state image pickup element is converted into digital image data, and any moiré component is extracted from the image data to detect a period of the moiré component. Pixel values of data collected at the period of moiré from a data series in X-axis direction or Y-axis direction of the image data are connected to find a plurality of smoothed curves from which defect components have been eliminated. Differences between pixel values positioned on that plurality of smoothed curves and the original image data are found to obtain defect component image data, and an average of the plurality of smoothed curves is found to obtain smoothed image data containing no moiré. This smoothed image data and the defect component image data are added and the addition result is stored in an image memory as image data for inspection.