An improved Wiener deconvolution filter for high-resolution electron microscopy images

• To simultaneously eliminate the MTF effect of CCD and reduce noise in HRTEM images, an improved Wiener deconvolution filter was proposed.
• We applied it in the graphite image, and on-estimated the power spectrum of noise.
• Details in the resulting image were clear and natural.
• It is the best one in the methods we discussed.
• It is applicable in strongly noisy HRTEM images of weak-scattering objects, such as few-layer graphene or boron nitride.

We propose an improved Wiener deconvolution filter for high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) images and apply it to an experimental graphite image. The improved filter can simultaneously eliminate the modulation transfer function effects of CCD cameras and reduce noise, thereby confirming its superiority over the general Wiener deconvolution and Wiener denoising filters. In the resulting image, graphene lattices appear. In particular, because of our on-estimation of the noise power spectrum, the vacuum remains naturally smooth and very clear graphene–vacuum boundaries generates. Quantitatively, the signal-to-noise ratio of the filtered image improves by a factor of 3. The proposed method is applicable to very noisy HRTEM images of weak scattering objects, such as few-layer graphene or boron nitride.