Charged-Particle Microscopy Scan Rotation for Charging Artifact Mitigation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Charged-particle microscopes often produce charging artifacts, such as streaks and distortions, in images of nonconductive specimens, which existing techniques struggle to mitigate across different microscopes and specimens due to lack of generalizability.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a system that captures multiple images of a specimen using varied scanning directions, correctively rotates and aligns them, and averages them to reduce or eliminate charging artifacts.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Object-affected harmful factors
If multiple images are captured and processed using scanning direction rotation, then charging artifact visibility is reduced, but imaging time and processing complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The imaging process is segmented into multiple separate image captures, each taken with a different scanning direction. By dividing the single imaging task into multiple directional scans, the charging artifacts that appear in any single direction are distributed across multiple images, allowing them to be reduced through subsequent averaging or selection of the best image.
2Object-affected harmful factors
If multiple images are captured and processed using scanning direction rotation, then charging artifact visibility is reduced, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The scanning direction is dynamically adjusted between image captures rather than using a fixed scanning direction. The system rotates the scanning direction by a predetermined angle for each subsequent image, creating a dynamic imaging process that adapts to reduce charging artifacts. This dynamic approach allows the same imaging system to effectively handle different artifact patterns without requiring multiple specialized devices.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems/techniques are provided for facilitating charging artifact mitigation via scanning direction rotation. In various embodiments, a system can access a charged-particle microscope that is loaded with a specimen. In various aspects, the system can generate an aggregated image of the specimen, based on a plurality of images of the specimen that are captured by the charged-particle microscope according to a target scanning direction and a plurality of rotated scanning directions. In some instances, the plurality of rotated scanning directions and the target scanning direction can be uniformly distributed within a 360-degree range. In various cases, the specimen can charge non-homogeneously during scanning, each of the plurality of images can exhibit respective charging artifacts, and the aggregated image can exhibit no or reduced charging artifacts.