The pitch measurement and AFM calibration precision are significantly influenced by the grating pitch evaluation method. This paper presents the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) based pitch evaluation method to relieve the accuracy deterioration caused by high and low frequency components of scanning profile during pitch evaluation. The simulation analysis shows that the application of EEMD can improve the pitch accuracy of the FFT-FT algorithm. The pitch error is small when the iteration number of the FFT-FT algorithms was 8. The AFM measurement of the 500 nm-pitch one-dimensional grating shows that the EEMD based pitch evaluation method could improve the pitch precision, especially the grating line position precision, and greatly expand the applicability of the gravity center algorithm when particles and impression marks were distributed on the sample surface. The measurement indicates that the nonlinearity was stable, and the nonlinearity of x axis and forward scanning was much smaller than their counterpart. Finally, a detailed pitch measurement uncertainty evaluation model suitable for commercial AFMs was demonstrated and a pitch uncertainty in the sub-nanometer range was achieved. The pitch uncertainty was reduced about 10% by EEMD. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.