Removal of Non-uniform Stripe Noises from AFM Images

Abstract

Due to abrupt increase in interacting strength of probed molecules and the AFM tip, the dramatic change in tip vibrations leads to a loss or inadequate acquisition of height information during the scanning across the sample surfaces. Consequently, stripe noises occur and immediately become the first encountered obstacle for characterizing objects in AFM images. The un-supervised DeStripe has been developed for removing stripes based on the Fourier spectrum of image. Since identification of noisy pixels is a critical step in the denoising procedure, the pixels selected by un-supervised DeStripe as potentially noisy may not be satisfactory for the user. The present work presents an alternative that the potentially noisy pixels are decided by input parameters. The computational procedure mainly follows the design of un-supervised DeStripe as described previously [1]. We found that the molecular feature of the cleaned image by the supervised protocol is more prominent than that by the un-supervised DeStripe.