  We present an efficient machine learning framework for detection and
classification of nanoparticles on surfaces that are detected in the far-field
with Coherent Fourier Scatterometry (CFS). We study silicon wafers contaminated
with spherical polystyrene (PSL) nanoparticles (with diameters down to
$\lambda/8$). Starting from the raw data, the proposed framework does the
pre-processing and particle search. Further, the unsupervised clustering
algorithms, such as K-means and DBSCAN, are customized to be used to define the
groups of signals that are attributed to a single scatterer. Finally, the
particle count versus particle size histogram is generated.
  The challenging cases of the high density of scatterers, noise and drift in
the dataset are treated. We take advantage of the prior information on the size
of the scatterers to minimize the false-detections and as a consequence,
provide higher discrimination ability and more accurate particle counting.
Numerical and real experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of
the proposed search and cluster-assessment techniques. Our results illustrate
that the proposed algorithm can detect surface contaminants correctly and
effectively.

Optics;Signal Processing