In order to promote further development of the inversion techniques so that they converge faster and more accurately to actual interface flaw geometries, experiments were conducted on samples with well-characterized flaw geometries. In these experiments, interfacial flaws of 10 to 100 µm in diameter were artificially generated in a Nb/sapphire interface system by using the photolithographic technique. In this strategy, a test coating deposited on the substrate is forced to buckle under the influence of a residually-strained Nb top layer. The buckling sites are controlled through an intervening layer of photoresist that is patterned with circular holes with dimensions approximately equal to that of the desired crack size. Because of the highly complaint photoresist layer, the residual stress from the Nb loading layer is fully relaxed and is not transmitted to the lower test layer. However, areas devoid of the photoresist results in the buckling of the test layer as the residual compressive stress of the Nb coating is fully transmitted to the lower test layer. After buckling, the photoresist and the Nb loading layers are removed by dissolving a sacrificial Al layer in HCl. This leaves a well-characterized interface flaw distribution with prescribed size and profile of individual cracks. Both circular and line flaws with dimensions anywhere between 10 and 500 µm could be generated using this strategy. One such well-characterized interface flaw was loaded with the parent stress pulse, and the distorted stress pulse arriving at the coating's free surface was recorded by using the optical interferometer. The information on interface flaw geometry and density provided the additional information for fine-tuning and further development of the numerical surface inversion routines. The paper will discuss the application of the above procedure to several metal/ceramic interfaces of current engineering interest.