Improvement of an Algorithm for Determining the Interplanar Distances of the Crystal Structure of a Substance from Transmission Electron Microscopy Images

Abstract

The paper considers the previously developed automated algorithm for determining the interplanar distances of the crystalline structure of a substance from images of transmission electron microscopy (TEM images), and also proposes a modification of the algorithm that allows to increase the automation level of obtaining the result. The question of automation of the process of normalization of images of crystal structures by angles of rotation is considered. Also, an alternative is proposed at the step of image binarization with a given threshold in the form of adaptive binarization with an automatically selected binarization window size. The improved algorithm was tested on a number of publicly available TEM images, and the interplanar distance measurements were compared with the measurements in the specialized software package named Digital Micrograph GMS 1.8. Comparison of the results showed that the proposed improved algorithm determines the distance with sufficient precision and fits within the range of measurement error for the considered images.