Correcting nonlinear drift distortion of scanning probe microscopy from image pairs with orthogonal scan directions

Abstract

Unwanted motion of the probe with respect to the sample is a ubiquitous problem in scanning probe microscopy, causing both linear and nonlinear artifacts in experimental images. We have designed a procedure to correct these artifacts by using orthogonal scan pairs to align each measurement line-by-line along the slow scan direction. We demonstrate the accuracy of our algorithm on both synthetic and experimental data and provide an implementation of our method.