Statistical Analysis of Measurement Processes Using Multi-Physic Instruments: Insights from Stitched Maps

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This work is fairly organized and presents some interesting points. However, improvement is imperative to elevate the work to align with the scope and readership of Metrology. Therefore, please improve the paper to clarify the answers to these points:

1. How effectively do the stitching methods described in the paper enable the measurement of a wider surface area with high resolution?

2. What are the potential errors or aberrations in topography reconstruction that could arise from the stitching methods, and how are these addressed or mitigated?

3. How does the device incorporating Confocal Microscopy (CM), Focus Variation (FV), and Coherence Scanning Interferometry (CSI) modes contribute to monitoring drifts and repositioning errors in stitching topographies?

4. Based on the presented measurement plan and indicators (Quality, Drift, Stability, and Relevance Indexes), how well-controlled are the stitching and repositioning processes for each instrument mode?

5. What insights are provided regarding the robustness, stability, and quality of measurements obtained through Interferometric microscopy, Confocal microscopy, and Focus Variation microscopy, respectively?

6. How does the proposed metrological methodology, Morphomeca Monitoring, contribute to quantifying the quality and reliability of topographical measurements, and what are its key attributes as highlighted in the study?

Author Response

Please find in the document below the responses to your comments which helped to improve the manuscript.

Thank you,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper presents a comprehensive study employing Morphomeca Monitoring, a metrological methodology, for scheduling and analyzing topographical measurements. This approach integrates four key indices: repeatability, stability, drift, and relevance, to quantify measurement quality and reliability. The conclusions drawn from the investigation highlight several key observations. The proposed methodology is characterized as robust, reproducible, automatable, and serving as a diagnostic tool for data monitoring to address metrological challenges. The topic of the paper is actual. The paper is well-structured and written, the achieved results are presented clearly.

While I believe the paper to be of high quality, I do have three comments and suggestions:

1, Using a question as the title of a paper is unconventional. I recommend revising the title accordingly.

2, The figures appear oversized.

3, 20 references (17 in Introduction) are insufficient for this kind of paper. In addition, only four references are less than five years old.

Author Response

Please find in the document below the responses to your comments which helped to improve the manuscript.

Thank you,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your interesting research in the field of surface morphology analysis on stitched maps. I completely understand the relevance of your research and motivation. Overall, I would like to say that you are doing an excellent job, both from the side of this issue and from the presentation of the result. In fact, I agree with everything in your manuscript, but I just have a couple of general questions. I hope they would help your future Readers understand your research topic more globally:

1. Introduction. When you talk about problems and results of similar methods of other groups of authors, could you give exact integer values for each of the parameters? What stability error are you talking about? What roughness range are you considering? And so on. Yes, it was also interesting to know how your surface analysis technique relates to fluctuations in ambient temperature? Does this affect the measurement? Or, for example, humidity?

2. Dear Authors, please explain about Figure 11. I couldn’t quite understand what quantities are considered on the x-axis? Why are the 10 classes so clearly divided? Why are there gaps of the same size between them? What dimension do the lower values have?

Kind regards,

Reviewer

Author Response

Please find in the document below the responses to your comments which helped to improve the manuscript.

Thank you,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors