It is often difficult to extract chemical distributions from TOF-SIMS (time-of-light secondary ion mass spectrometry) images because intensity contrast can originate from several sources, including; ( 1) sample chemistry; ( 2) surface topography; ( 3) matrix effects; and ( 4) differential charging. Several methods, to extract the chemical distribution from TOF-SIMS images that are affected by surface topography, such as normalization by total ion intensity and PCA ( principal component analysis), have been carried out. However, these methods have not been successful in all cases. In this study, we have tried to remove topographic artifacts by using correlation coefficient-mapping (CCM) method. In order to investigate the usefulness of CCM, it was applied to three types of specimens that had topographical artifacts and/or chemical distributions. These results suggest that topographic artifacts can be removed in TOF-SIMS images using CCM, revealing more accurate inhomogeneous chemical distributions. (C) 2008 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.