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Surface reconstruction from stereoscopy and “shape from shading” in SEM images

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Abstract

The computational reconstruction of surface topographies from scanning electron microscope (SEM) images has been extensively investigated in the past, but fundamental image processing problems still exist. Since conventional approaches adapted from general-purpose image processing have not sufficiently met the requirements in terms of resolution and reliability, we have explored combining different methods to obtain better results.

This paper presents a least-squares combination of conventional stereoscopy with “shape from shading” and a way of obtaining self-consistent surface profiles from stereoscopy and “stereo-intrinsic shape from shading” using dynamic programming techniques. Results are presented showing how this combined analysis of multi-sensorial data yields improvements of the reconstructed surface topography that cannot be obtained from individual sensor signals alone.

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Beil, W., Carlsen, I.C. Surface reconstruction from stereoscopy and “shape from shading” in SEM images. Machine Vis. Apps. 4, 271–285 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01815304

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