293,462 research outputs found
Sparsity-Based Super Resolution for SEM Images
The scanning electron microscope (SEM) produces an image of a sample by
scanning it with a focused beam of electrons. The electrons interact with the
atoms in the sample, which emit secondary electrons that contain information
about the surface topography and composition. The sample is scanned by the
electron beam point by point, until an image of the surface is formed. Since
its invention in 1942, SEMs have become paramount in the discovery and
understanding of the nanometer world, and today it is extensively used for both
research and in industry. In principle, SEMs can achieve resolution better than
one nanometer. However, for many applications, working at sub-nanometer
resolution implies an exceedingly large number of scanning points. For exactly
this reason, the SEM diagnostics of microelectronic chips is performed either
at high resolution (HR) over a small area or at low resolution (LR) while
capturing a larger portion of the chip. Here, we employ sparse coding and
dictionary learning to algorithmically enhance LR SEM images of microelectronic
chips up to the level of the HR images acquired by slow SEM scans, while
considerably reducing the noise. Our methodology consists of two steps: an
offline stage of learning a joint dictionary from a sequence of LR and HR
images of the same region in the chip, followed by a fast-online
super-resolution step where the resolution of a new LR image is enhanced. We
provide several examples with typical chips used in the microelectronics
industry, as well as a statistical study on arbitrary images with
characteristic structural features. Conceptually, our method works well when
the images have similar characteristics. This work demonstrates that employing
sparsity concepts can greatly improve the performance of SEM, thereby
considerably increasing the scanning throughput without compromising on
analysis quality and resolution.Comment: Final publication available at ACS Nano Letter
Adaptive foveated single-pixel imaging with dynamic super-sampling
As an alternative to conventional multi-pixel cameras, single-pixel cameras
enable images to be recorded using a single detector that measures the
correlations between the scene and a set of patterns. However, to fully sample
a scene in this way requires at least the same number of correlation
measurements as there are pixels in the reconstructed image. Therefore
single-pixel imaging systems typically exhibit low frame-rates. To mitigate
this, a range of compressive sensing techniques have been developed which rely
on a priori knowledge of the scene to reconstruct images from an under-sampled
set of measurements. In this work we take a different approach and adopt a
strategy inspired by the foveated vision systems found in the animal kingdom -
a framework that exploits the spatio-temporal redundancy present in many
dynamic scenes. In our single-pixel imaging system a high-resolution foveal
region follows motion within the scene, but unlike a simple zoom, every frame
delivers new spatial information from across the entire field-of-view. Using
this approach we demonstrate a four-fold reduction in the time taken to record
the detail of rapidly evolving features, whilst simultaneously accumulating
detail of more slowly evolving regions over several consecutive frames. This
tiered super-sampling technique enables the reconstruction of video streams in
which both the resolution and the effective exposure-time spatially vary and
adapt dynamically in response to the evolution of the scene. The methods
described here can complement existing compressive sensing approaches and may
be applied to enhance a variety of computational imagers that rely on
sequential correlation measurements.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure
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