Image Difference Metrics for High-Resolution Electron Microscopy

TL;DR

This paper evaluates and compares two image difference metrics for high-resolution electron microscopy images, focusing on their noise robustness and application to precipitate size measurement.

Contribution

It introduces and tests two less-used image difference metrics specifically for high-resolution TEM images, comparing their performance to traditional methods.

Findings

The new metrics show improved noise robustness over mean squared error.

Subjective evaluation aligns more closely with the new metrics than with MSE.

The methods effectively determine precipitate sizes in TEM images.

Abstract

Digital image comparison and matching brings many advantages over the traditional subjective human comparison, including speed and reproducibility. Despite the existence of an abundance of image difference metrics, most of them are not suited for high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) images. In this work we adopt two image difference metrics not widely used for TEM images. We compare them to subjective evaluation and to the mean squared error in regards to their behaviour regarding image noise pollution. Finally, the methods are applied to and tested by the task of determining precipitate sizes of a model material.