Ellipse

Equidistant

Transmission electron microscopy

Materials science

High-resolution transmission electron microscopy

Electron tomography

Economics

Column (typography)

Computer science

Resolution (logic)

Physics

Database

Mathematics

Optics

Position (finance)

Artificial intelligence

Geometry

Connection (principal bundle)

Measure (data warehouse)

Scanning transmission electron microscopy

Finance

Micron

In this paper, we propose a multiple-ellipse fitting method to accurately determine the atomic column positions in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images. The column is enclosed by a series of ellipses fitted from contour lines at equidistant intensity levels, and each atomic column is shaped by an averaged elliptical shape to obtain its positions. In particular, the intensity profile of the atomic column can be obtained by an elliptically rotational average based on its shape; therefore, the intensities of the neighbouring atomic column can be subtracted for each atomic column during subsequent position refinement. This method can achieve precision in the picometre range, and we quantitatively measure this precision by analysing an image containing two Gaussian-shaped atoms and some simulated high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) images of SrTiO3.

Multiple-ellipse fitting method to precisely measure the positions of atomic columns in a transmission electron microscope image