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Publication

Fact or Fiction: Maximal Image Quality with Minimal Dwell Time

Patrick Trampert; Tim Dahmen; Philipp Slusallek
In: Microscopy and Microanalysis, Vol. 24, No. S1, Pages 480-481, Cambridge University Press, 8/2018.

Abstract

Image quality in scanning electron microscopy is highly dependent on the maximal feasible acquisition time for a dataset. In particular, three-dimensional or large field-of-view imaging suffer from high shot noise, which results in low signal-to-noise ratios and excessive acquisition times. We compared three different strategies to reduce the average dwell time per pixel. We fixed the available acquisition time per frame to make the strategies comparable in terms of maximal possible image quality. The evaluated methods were (1) raster scanning with a reduced dwell time per pixel followed by a state-of-the-art Denoising algorithm, (2) raster scanning with a decreased resolution in conjunction with a state-of-theart Super Resolution (SR) algorithm, and (3) a sparse scanning approach where a fixed percentage of pixels is visited by the beam in combination with state-of-the-art inpainting algorithms. Additionally, increased beam currents were considered for each strategy.