Simultaneous implementation of noise reduction and incline emendation for atomic force microscopic images

The wavelet-shrinkage-based image denoising technique was applied to removal of the noise in an atomic force microscopic (AFM) image, and simultaneously, the least square fitting was applied to the approximate sub-image to emendate the inclined plane, thus implementing the image de-noising and incline emendation simultaneously. As incline emendation was implemented in the approximate sub-band, the time cost for incline fitting of the method was greatly reduced, and hence the real-time performance of the algorithm was improved. In addition, as the algorithm was implemented by means of wavelet transform, it can be easily combined with wavelet-based image compression, which is beneficial to in-situ analysis and processing of AFM images. Through the experiments on an AFM image, the effectiveness of the new method was tested and evaluated.