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Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on December 15, 2006
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2006 55(5):253-260; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfl034
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Microscopy. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Influence of a combination of random noise and pattern-edge width (in pixels) on contrast-to-gradient image resolution in scanning electron microscopy

Tohru Ishitani* and Mitsugu Sato

Nanotechnology Products Business Group, Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation 882 Ichige, Hitachinaka-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 312-8504 Japan

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ishitani-tohru{at}naka.hitachi-hitec.com

The contrast-to-gradient (CG) method has been proposed previously for the evaluation of image resolution in scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In the CG algorithm, the image to be evaluated is gradually reduced to form the 1/r-reduced image (r = 1, 2, 3, ...) until the representative features of local patterns are accurately recognizable after the corresponding r-th noise reduction. We have studied the influence of a combination of random noise and pattern-edge width (in pixels) on the CG resolution R using both PC-made test images and typical SEM images. As the random noise is larger, the value of R becomes larger (or poorer). The increase in R due to the noise influence is more significant for the narrower width of the pattern edge. This satisfactorily agrees with the common idea that the image resolution is to reflect the sharpness of the pattern edge recognized in the image noise. By revising the form of {Delta}R from the weighted standard fluctuation of R to the differential of R, a significantly weak Ndot-dependency on R has been favorably confirmed, with keeping firmly the noise-dependency on R. Here, Ndot is the number of pattern dots in the image.

Keywords     image resolution, noise, contrast-to-gradient, scanning electron microscope

Received     29 May 2006, accepted 7 November 2006


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T. Ishitani and M. Sato
Evaluation of both image resolution and contrast-to-noise ratio in scanning electron microscopy
J. Electron Microsc. (Tokyo), October 31, 2007; (2007) dfm007v1.
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