Drift correction for scanning-electron microscopy

Scanning electron micrographs at high magnification (100,000x and up) are distorted by motion of the sample during image acquisition, a phenomenon called drift. We propose a method for correcting drift distortion in images obtained on scanning electron and other scanned-beam microscopes by registering a series of images to create a drift-free composite. We develop a drift-distortion model for linear drift and use it as a basis for an affine correction between images in the sequence. The performance of our correction method is evaluated with simulated datasets and real datasets taken on both scanning electron and scanning helium-ion microscopes; we compare performance against translation only correction. In simulation, we exhibit a 12.5 dB improvement in SNR of our drift-corrected composite compared to a non-aligned composite, and a 3 dB improvement over translation correction. A more modest 0.4 dB improvement is measured on the real image sets compared to translation correction alone.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Snella, Michael T

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karl K. Berggren and Vivek K Goyal.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/62605

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/62605