Computer Vision for Nanoscale Imaging

Eraldo Ribeiro, Mubarak Shah

Abstract: The main goal of Nanotechnology is to analyze and understand the properties of matter at the atomic and molecular level. Computer vision is rapidly expanding into this new and exciting field of application, and considerable research efforts are currently being spent on developing new image-based characterization techniques to analyze nanoscale images. Nanoscale characterization requires algorithms to perform image analysis under extremely challenging conditions such as low signal-to-noise ratio and low resolution. To achieve this, nanotechnology researchers require imaging tools that are able to enhance images, detect objects and features, reconstruct 3D geometry, and tracking. This paper reviews current advances in computer vision and related areas applied to imaging nanoscale objects. We categorize the algorithms, describe their representative methods, and conclude with several promising directions of future investigation.