Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on September 29, 2005
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2005 54(5):429-435; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfi062
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Evolutionary computation applied to the reconstruction of 3-D surface topography in the SEM
1 Department of Information Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mie University, Tsu 514-8507, Japan, 2 Department of Computational Science and Engineering and 3 Department of Electrical Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: kodama{at}pa.info.mie-u.ac.jp
A genetic algorithm has been applied to the line profile reconstruction from the signals of the standard secondary electron (SE) and/or backscattered electron detectors in a scanning electron microscope. This method solves the topographical surface reconstruction problem as one of combinatorial optimization. To extend this optimization approach for three-dimensional (3-D) surface topography, this paper considers the use of a string coding where a 3-D surface topography is represented by a set of coordinates of vertices. We introduce the Delaunay triangulation, which attains the minimum roughness for any set of height data to capture the fundamental features of the surface being probed by an electron beam. With this coding, the strings are processed with a class of hybrid optimization algorithms that combine genetic algorithms and simulated annealing algorithms. Experimental results on SE images are presented.
Keywords evolutionary algorithm, Delaunay triangulation, surface topography, scanning electron microscopy
Received 30 May 2005, accepted 5 September 2005