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Measuring Surface Topography with Scanning Electron Microscopy. I. EZEImage: A Program to Obtain 3D Surface Data

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2005

Ezequiel Ponz ,
Juan Luis Ladaga  and
Rita Dominga Bonetto
Ezequiel Ponz
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Ciencias Aplicadas Dr. Jorge J. Ronco (CINDECA) CONICET—UNLP, 47 No. 257-CC 59, 1900 La Plata, Argentina
Juan Luis Ladaga
Affiliation:
Facultad de Ingeniería de la Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Departamento de Física—Laboratorio de Láser, Paseo Colón 850, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Rita Dominga Bonetto
Affiliation:
Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo en Ciencias Aplicadas Dr. Jorge J. Ronco (CINDECA) CONICET—UNLP, 47 No. 257-CC 59, 1900 La Plata, Argentina
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Abstract

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is widely used in the science of materials and different parameters were developed to characterize the surface roughness. In a previous work, we studied the surface topography with fractal dimension at low scale and two parameters at high scale by using the variogram, that is, variance vs. step log–log graph, of a SEM image. Those studies were carried out with the FERImage program, previously developed by us. To verify the previously accepted hypothesis by working with only an image, it is indispensable to have reliable three-dimensional (3D) surface data. In this work, a new program (EZEImage) to characterize 3D surface topography in SEM has been developed. It uses fast cross correlation and dynamic programming to obtain reliable dense height maps in a few seconds which can be displayed as an image where each gray level represents a height value. This image can be used for the FERImage program or any other software to obtain surface topography characteristics. EZEImage also generates anaglyph images as well as characterizes 3D surface topography by means of a parameter set to describe amplitude properties and three functional indices for characterizing bearing and fluid properties.

Keywords

dense height mapdynamic programmingfast cross correlationprogram3D surface topography in SEM
Type
MICROSCOPY TECHNIQUES
Information
Microscopy and Microanalysis , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 2006 , pp. 170 - 177
Copyright
© 2006 Microscopy Society of America

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