Optical condition determination system and optical condition determination method

An optical condition determination method by an optical condition determination system for determining an optical condition to be applied to an appearance inspection, the method comprising:

• a simulation execution step for performing an optical simulation on a surface texture model that models a surface texture of a target object of the appearance inspection, and a defect model that models a defect of the target object, under a plurality of optical conditions to generate a surface texture image and a defect image;
• an image synthesizing step for synthesizing the surface texture image and the defect image generated by an optical simulation under the same optical condition to generate a synthetic image;
• an evaluation value calculation step for calculating an evaluation value representing easiness of detecting the defect in the synthetic image;
• a correlation analysis step for analyzing a correlation between an optical condition and the evaluation value corresponding to the synthetic image;
• and
• an optimum condition searching step for searching for the optical condition suitable for the appearance inspection based on an analysis result of the correlation.