# Preventing Degenerate Results

You can reduce the likelihood that PatMax will detect degenerate results by following these guidelines:

- Make sure your pattern offers distinct information in all the degrees of freedom you enable in your alignment.
- Only enable the degrees of freedom that will actually change from run-time image to run-time image. If the value for a degree of freedom will be the same for all images, specify a nominal value for that degree of freedom.
- Make sure that your run-time image does not contain extraneous features.
- Obtain the information strings for each pattern you train and for each alignment you perform.