EELS elemental mapping with unconventional methods. I. Theoretical basis: image analysis with multivariate statistics...

Electron energy loss filtered images recorded within a transmission analytical electron microscope are now widely used for the mapping of the elemental distribution of a given atomic species in a specimen prepared as a thin film. Such an image processing may produce both valuable results and artifacts if a careful inspection of all the hypotheses needed by the calculation is not carried out. This paper presents some general statistical methods for a contrast information analysis of a noisy image data set. After a brief introduction of different concepts such as contrast, variance, information and entropy, two unconventional approaches for image analysis are explained: the relative entropy computed with respect to a pure random and signal-free image and the factorial analysis of correspondence (a branch of multivariate statistics). In the companion article (part II), these concepts are applied to real experiments and the results compared with those obtained with a conventional method. Although electron energy loss spectroscopy is the only technique considered here, these methods for image analysis can be applied to a wide variety of noisy data sets (spectra, images, ...) recorded from various sources (electrons, photons, ...).