Publications

Schwartz, J; Jiang, Y; Wang, YJ; Aiello, A; Bhattacharya, P; Yuan, H; Mi, ZT; Bassim, N; Hovden, R (2019). Removing Stripes, Scratches, and Curtaining with Nonrecoverable Compressed Sensing. MICROSCOPY AND MICROANALYSIS, 25(3), 705-710.

Abstract
Highly-directional image artifacts such as ion mill curtaining, mechanical scratches, or image striping from beam instability degrade the interpretability of micrographs. These unwanted, aperiodic features extend the image along a primary direction and occupy a small wedge of information in Fourier space. Deleting this wedge of data replaces stripes, scratches, or curtaining, with more complex streaking and blurring artifacts-known within the tomography community as missing wedge artifacts. Here, we overcome this problem by recovering the missing region using total variation minimization, which leverages image sparsity-based reconstruction techniques-colloquially referred to as compressed sensing (CS)-to reliably restore images corrupted by stripe-like features. Our approach removes beam instability, ion mill curtaining, mechanical scratches, or any stripe features and remains robust at low signal-to-noise. The success of this approach is achieved by exploiting CS's inability to recover directional structures that are highly localized and missing in Fourier Space.

DOI:
10.1017/S1431927619000254

ISSN:
1431-9276