Proper acquisition and handling of scanning electron microscopy images using a high‐performance personal computer

Abstract

Abstract The modern high‐performance personal computer (PC) has very recently expanded the range of utilization of digital scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images, and the PC will be used increasingly with SEMs. However, the image quality of digital SEM images may be considerably influenced by scanning and digitization conditions. In particular, the effects of the aliasing error peculiar to digital data are often serious in the low‐magnification acquisition (undersampling) of SEM images, and moreover even a high‐magnification image (oversampling) is disturbed by the undersampled noise (a sort of aliasing error). Furthermore, the signal‐to‐noise ratio of a digitized SEM image is closely related to the performance of the analog‐to‐digital converter. To prevent a flood of low‐quality digital images with artifacts by the aliasing and additional noise, we propose a method using very high‐density sampling (scanning). In addition, we will discuss how to handle digital SEM images from the point of view of the sampling and quantization.