Practical method for noise removal in scanning electron microscopy

Abstract

Abstract A new smoothing filter has been developed for noise removal of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. We call this the complex hysteresis smoothing (CHS) filter. It is much easier to use for SEM operators than any other conventional smoothing filter, and it rarely produces processing artifacts because it does not utilize a definite mask (which usually has processing parameters of size, shape, weight, and the number of iterations) like a common averaging filter or a complicated filter shape in the Fourier domain. Its criterion for distinguishing noise depends simply on the amplitude of the SEM signal. When applied to several images with different characteristics, it is shown that the present method has a high performance with some original advantages.