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Updated: Feb 12, 2026

Picometer-Precision Atomic Position Tracking through Electron Microscopy
Published on: July 3, 2021
Feature extraction via similarity search: application to atom finding and denoising in electron and scanning probe
Suhas Somnath1,2, Christopher R Smith1,2, Sergei V Kalinin1,2
11The Institute for Functional Imaging of Materials, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37801 USA.
Abstract:
We develop an algorithm for feature extraction based on structural similarity and demonstrate its application for atom and pattern finding in high-resolution electron and scanning probe microscopy images. The use of the combined local identifiers formed from an image subset and appended Fourier, or other transform, allows tuning selectivity to specific patterns based on the nature of the recognition task. The proposed algorithm is implemented in Pycroscopy, a community-driven scientific data analysis package, and is accessible through an interactive Jupyter notebook available on GitHub.
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