Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Nanotechnology. 2016 Jun 10;27(23):235701. doi: 10.1088/0957-4484/27/23/235701. Epub 2016 Apr 27.
A method for automated quantification of the alignment of one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures from microscopy imaging is presented. Nanostructure alignment metrics are formulated and shown to be able to rigorously quantify the orientational order of nanostructures within a two-dimensional domain (surface). A complementary image processing method is also presented which enables robust processing of microscopy images where overlapping nanostructures might be present. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of nanowire-covered surfaces are analyzed using the presented methods and it is shown that past single parameter alignment metrics are insufficient for highly aligned domains. Through the use of multiple parameter alignment metrics, automated quantitative analysis of SEM images is shown to be possible and the alignment characteristics of different samples are able to be quantitatively compared using a similarity metric. The results of this work provide researchers in nanoscience and nanotechnology with a rigorous method for the determination of structure/property relationships, where alignment of 1D nanostructures is significant.
提出了一种从显微镜成像自动量化一维（1D）纳米结构排列的方法。制定了纳米结构对准度量标准，并证明能够严格量化二维域（表面）内纳米结构的取向有序性。还提出了一种互补的图像处理方法，该方法能够稳健地处理可能存在重叠纳米结构的显微镜图像。使用提出的方法分析了纳米线覆盖表面的扫描电子显微镜（SEM）图像，并表明过去的单一参数对准度量标准对于高度对准的域是不够的。通过使用多个参数对准度量标准，证明可以对 SEM 图像进行自动定量分析，并可以使用相似性度量对不同样品的对准特性进行定量比较。这项工作的结果为纳米科学和纳米技术领域的研究人员提供了一种严格的方法，用于确定结构/性能关系，其中 1D 纳米结构的排列是重要的。
