Gaussian process regression for efficient parameter reconstruction

This blog post is based on the publication P.-I. Schneider, et al. Using Gaussian process regression for efficient parameter reconstruction. Proc. SPIE 10959, 1095911 (2019).

DOI: 10.1117/12.2513268

Optical scatterometry is a method to measure the size and shape of periodic micro- or nanostructures on surfaces. For this purpose the geometry parameters of the structures are obtained by reproducing experimental measurement results through numerical simulations. The performance of Bayesian optimization as implemented in JCMsuite's optimization toolbox is compared to different local minimization algorithms for this numerical optimization problem. Bayesian optimization uses Gaussian-process regression to find promising parameter values. The paper examines how pre-computed simulation results can be used to train the Gaussian process and to accelerate the optimization.