In a defect inspection apparatus which combines a plurality of probes for
measuring electric properties of a specimen including a fine circuit line
pattern with a charged particle beam apparatus, the charged particle beam
apparatus reduces a degradation in resolution even with an image-shift of
.+-.75 .mu.m or more. The defect inspection apparatus has a CAD
navigation function associated with an image-shift function. The CAD
navigation function uses coordinates for converting an image-shift moving
amount to a DUT stage moving amount in communications between an image
processing unit for processing charged particle beam images and a memory
for storing information on circuit line patterns. The defect inspection
provides the user with significantly improved usability.