NEW-GENERATION SCANNING ELECTRON-MICROSCOPY TECHNOLOGY-BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF ACTIVE IMAGE-PROCESSING

A new generation of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) technology is p roposed based on the concept of ''active image processing.'' In order to collect sufficient data for a purpose which is defined in the utili zation of active image processing, we may need more devices from among a variety of useful hardware, for example, a digital scan generator w ith meaningful parameters and an analog-to-digital converter for ultra high density recording. After the data acquisition, the application of some digital image processing techniques is certainly effective, beca use the method in question is specially designed so that the property of obtained data will be suitable for the application of these techniq ues. The present technology should produce a variety of attractive opt ions in the field of SEM.