Elimination of periodic damped artifacts in scanning probe microscopy images

摘要

When scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is operated at high scan rates, stripe-like artifacts will appear frequently in the SPM images. The removal of the image artifacts is highly demanded because they will distort the results in precise measurements. In this work, a method based on Prony analysis has been introduced to erase such periodic damped artifacts. Results demonstrate that this method prevails against the conventional fast Fourier transformation (FFT) method. Clean eliminations of the image artifacts are obtained, with almost no sacrifice of the detailed surface information. Even for arbitrary rough surfaces, the image artifacts can also be reduced by more than one order of magnitude. However, small amounts of stripes may still remain in the images. In these cases, the Prony analysis combined with locally weighted smoothing will provide better image quality. The artifacts reduction can have a meaning in the SPM-based visualization of dynamic phenomena with a nanoscale resolution.