Restoration of images from the scanning-tunneling microscope

During the acquisition of an image from any probe microscope instrument, various noise sources cause distortion in the observed image. It is often the case that impulsive disturbances cause bright groups of pixels to replace the actual image data in these locations. Furthermore, the images from a probe microscope show some amount of blurring caused both by the instrument function and the material properties. In almost all image-processing applications it is important to remove any impulsive distortion that may be present before deblurring can be attempted. We give a technique for detecting these impulses and reconstructing the image. This technique is superior to the standard global application of median filters for the case considered. The reconstruction is limited only to the affected regions and therefore results in a much sharper and more meaningful image. With the assumption of Gaussian blur it is then possible to propose several different deblurring methodologies. We present a novel Wiener-filter deblurring implementation and compare it to both maximum-entropy and Richardson-Lucy deblurring.