Image drift compensation in scanning electron microscopy facilitated by an external scanning and imaging system

Abstract

Microstructures significantly influence the physical properties of materials. Characterizing the evolution of materials' microstructures is helpful for exploring the processing techniques and understanding the thermodynamic properties of materials. However, the in-situ experiments based on the scanning electron microscope (SEM) often suffer from non-uniform image drift distortion, which severely interferes with the imaging and characterization. Therefore, in this study, we develop an external scanning and imaging system for dynamic image drift compensation during the in-situ SEM experiments. The drifted image was dynamically corrected to the center of view by changing the path of the electron beams. The proposed method was compared with three conventional image correction methods to validate its effectiveness in two scenarios, i.e., in-situ translation experiment and in-situ heating experiment. The results showed that the image registration technique combined with the electron beam trajectory correction effectively compensated the image drift caused by irregular sample motion. Compared with existing image post-processing methods, we have achieved real-time drift compensation of the images. For the secondary electron (SE) image with a resolution of 1024 × 1024 pixels compensated based on the method proposed in this paper, the maximum pixel loss within the field of view is only 3 pixels. This technology can effectively correct image drift caused by high temperatures during the in-situ progress, thereby helping material characterization.