Image Resolution in Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy

Digital images captured with electron microscopes are corrupted by two fundamental effects: shot noise resulting from electron counting statistics and blur resulting from the nonzero width of the focused electron beam. The generic problem of computationally undoing these effects is called image reconstruction and for decades has proved to be one of the most challenging and important problems in imaging science. This proposal concerned the application of the Pixon method, the highest-performance image-reconstruction algorithm yet devised, to the enhancement of images obtained from the highest-resolution electron microscopes in the world, now in operation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory