AnyStitch: a tool for combining electron backscatter diffraction data sets

Recent advances in electron backscatter diffraction equipment and software have permitted increased data acquisition rates on the order of hundreds of points per second with additional increases in the foreseeable future likely. This increase in speed allows users to collect data from statistically significant areas of samples by combining beam-control scans and automated stage movements. To facilitate data analysis, however, the individual tiles must be combined, or stitched, into a single data set. In this paper, we describe a matlab(®) (The Mathworks, Inc., Natick, MA, USA) program to facilitate stitching of electron backscatter diffraction data. The method offers users a wide range of controls for tile placement including independent overlaps for horizontal and vertical tiles and also includes a parameter to account for systematic stage positioning errors or improperly calibrated scan rotation. The code can stitch data collected on either square or hexagonal grids and contains a function to reduce the resolution of square grid data if the resulting file is too large (or has too many grains) to be opened by the analysis software. The software was primarily written to work with TSL(®) OIM™ data sets and includes a function to quickly read compressed *.osc files into a variable in the matlab(®) workspace as opposed to using slower, text-reading functions. The output file is in *.ang format and can be opened directly by TSL(®) OIM™ Analysis software. A set of functions to facilitate stitching of text-based *.ctf files produced by Oxford Instruments HKL systems are also included. Finally, the code can also be used to combine *.tif images to produce a montage. The source code, a graphical user interface and a compiled version of the software was made available in the online version of this paper.