Perhaps surprisingly, the total electron microscopy (EM) data collected to date is less than a cubic millimeter. Consequently, there is an enormous demand in the materials and biological sciences to image at greater speed and lower dosage, while maintaining resolution. Traditional EM imaging based on homogeneous raster-order scanning severely limits the volume of high-resolution data that can be collected, and presents a fundamental limitation to understanding physical processes such as material deformation, crack propagation, and pyrolysis. We introduce a novel multi-resolution data fusion (MDF) method for super-resolution computational EM. Our method combines innovative data acquisition with novel algorithmic techniques to dramatically improve the resolution volume speed trade-off. The key to our approach is to collect the entire sample at low resolution, while simultaneously collecting a small fraction of data at high resolution. The high-resolution measurements are then used to create a material-specific patch-library that is used within the "plug-and-play" framework to dramatically improve super-resolution of the low-resolution data. We present results using FEI electron microscope data that demonstrate super-resolution factors of 4x, 8x, and 16x, while substantially maintaining high image quality and reducing dosage.
Scanning electron microscopes (SEMs) are used in neuroscience and materials science to image centimeters of sample area at nanometer scales. Since imaging rates are in large part SNR-limited, large collections can lead to weeks of around-the-clock imaging time. To increase data collection speed, we propose and demonstrate on an operational SEM a fast method to sparsely sample and reconstruct smooth images. To accurately localize the electron probe position at fast scan rates, we model the dynamics of the scan coils, and use the model to rapidly and accurately visit a randomly selected subset of pixel locations. Images are reconstructed from the undersampled data by compressed sensing inversion using image smoothness as a prior. We report image fidelity as a function of acquisition speed by comparing traditional raster to sparse imaging modes. Our approach is equally applicable to other domains of nanometer microscopy in which the time to position a probe is a limiting factor (e.g., atomic force microscopy), or in which excessive electron doses might otherwise alter the sample being observed (e.g., scanning transmission electron microscopy). Denoising and Super-Resolution are two inverse problems that have been extensively studied. Over the years, these two tasks were treated as two distinct problems that deserve a different algorithmic solution. In this paper we wish to exploit the recently introduced Plug-and-Play Prior (PPP) approach [1] to connect between the two. Using the PPP, we turn leading denoisers into super-resolution solvers. As a case-study we demonstrate this on the NCSR algorithm, which has two variants: one for denoising and one for superresolution. We show that by using the NCSR denoiser, one can get equal or even better results when compared with the NCSR super-resolution.