Scanning Electron Microscope Calibration Using a Multi-Image Non-Linear Minimization Process

A scanning electron microscope (SEM) calibrating approach based on non-linear minimization procedure is presented in this article1 1A part of this article has been published in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2014.. Both the intrinsic parameters and the extrinsic parameters estimations are achieved simultaneously by minimizing the registration error. The proposed approach considers multi-images of a multi-scale calibration pattern view from different positions and orientations. Since the projection geometry of the scanning electron microscope is different from that of a classical optical sensor, the perspective projection model and the parallel projection model are considered and compared with distortion models. Experiments are realized by varying the position and the orientation of a multi-scale chessboard calibration pattern from 300× to 10,000×. The experimental results show the efficiency and the accuracy of this approach.