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A combination of topographical contrast and stereoscopy for the reconstruction of surface topographies in SEM
Author(s) -
Beil W.,
Carlsen I. C.
Publication year - 1990
Publication title -
journal of microscopy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.569
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1365-2818
pISSN - 0022-2720
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2818.1990.tb02953.x
Subject(s) - stereoscopy , photometric stereo , perspective (graphical) , shading , surface reconstruction , computer vision , surface (topology) , artificial intelligence , point (geometry) , optics , contrast (vision) , orientation (vector space) , computer science , materials science , computer graphics (images) , geometry , physics , mathematics , image (mathematics)
SUMMARY The reconstruction of three‐dimensional surface topographies can be done in two principally different ways: conventional stereoscopy and ‘shape from shading’. In conventional stereoscopy the depth information is obtained from two perspective views of the specimen. For that, perspectively corresponding features have to be identified in both views to determine depth from perspective shift. Conventional stereoscopy normally results in a relatively sparse set of irregularly distributed points whose elevations are known precisely. The shape‐from‐shading approach determines the local surface orientation from the local surface luminosity. Over a limited range of surface inclinations the emission of secondary (SE) and back‐scattered (BSE) electrons depends uniquely on the angle between electron beam and local surface normal of the specimen. Shape from shading uses this relationship to determine the surface normal with multiple detectors mounted in different take‐off directions. Contrary to conventional stereoscopy shape from shading yields depth information from each surface point, but this method is less accurate than stereoscopy. In this paper we propose a combination of both approaches, in which the dense, but less accurate results from shape from shading are used to fill the gaps in the sparsely distributed, but very accurately known, depth information obtained from stereoscopy.