Bonagiri Lalith Krishna Samanth, Wang Zirui, Zhou Shan, Zhang Yingjie
Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, United States.
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, United States.
Nano Lett. 2024 Feb 28;24(8):2589-2595. doi: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c04712. Epub 2024 Jan 22.
Surface topography, or height profile, is a critical property for various micro- and nanostructured materials and devices, as well as biological systems. At the nanoscale, atomic force microscopy (AFM) is the tool of choice for surface profiling due to its capability to noninvasively map the topography of almost all types of samples. However, this method suffers from one drawback: the convolution of the nanoprobe's shape in the height profile of the samples, which is especially severe for sharp protrusion features. Here, we report a deep learning (DL) approach to overcome this limit. Adopting an image-to-image translation methodology, we use data sets of tip-convoluted and deconvoluted image pairs to train an encoder-decoder based deep convolutional neural network. The trained network successfully removes the tip convolution from AFM topographic images of various nanocorrugated surfaces and recovers the true, precise 3D height profiles of these samples.
表面形貌,即高度轮廓,对于各种微纳结构材料、器件以及生物系统而言都是一项关键特性。在纳米尺度下,原子力显微镜(AFM)因其能够以非侵入方式绘制几乎所有类型样品的形貌,故而成为表面轮廓分析的首选工具。然而,该方法存在一个缺点:纳米探针形状会在样品的高度轮廓中产生卷积,这对于尖锐的突出特征尤为严重。在此,我们报告一种深度学习(DL)方法以克服这一限制。采用图像到图像的转换方法,我们使用尖端卷积和去卷积图像对的数据集来训练基于编码器 - 解码器的深度卷积神经网络。经过训练的网络成功地从各种纳米波纹表面的AFM形貌图像中去除了尖端卷积,并恢复了这些样品真实、精确的三维高度轮廓。