Millimeter scale global visual field construction for atomic force microscopy based on automatic image stitching

Aiming at the drawback of not being able to take into account of imaging range and imaging precision simultaneously for an common atomic force microscopy (AFM), a method based on the automatic image stitching is proposed to construct the global visual field of an AFM. In detail, the scanning rule and corresponding image stitching strategy is firstly designed to structure the overall layout for the AFM resulting image. Then, to increase success rate of image stitching, we put forward an improved SURF feature extraction algorithm with automatic parameter adjustment. Afterwards, on the basis of the automatic stitching, an auxiliary manual step is proposed to ensure successful construction of the global vision. Finally, a sub-regional linear weighted fusion method is proposed to improve the overall performance. Experimental results show that this proposed method extends the imaging range to millimeter scale while ensuring the high imaging accuracy.