Ald. Beckers et al., AN EFFICIENT METHOD FOR CALCULATING THE LEAST-SQUARES BACKGROUND FIT IN ELECTRON-ENERGY-LOSS SPECTROSCOPY, Journal of Microscopy, 171, 1993, pp. 87-92
In quantitative electron energy-loss spectroscopy, an estimate has to
be made of the unspecific spectral background to obtain the element-sp
ecific contribution of an ionization edge. For energy losses above c.
100 eV, such a background estimate is commonly performed by calculatin
g the least-squares fit of a power-law model to a part of the pre-edge
region of the spectrum and by extrapolating this model to the region
beyond the edge. Existing methods are cumbersome in terms of computati
on time and stability, or yield biased estimates. Computation efficien
cy becomes important when processing spectral-image sequences. In this
paper a new, computationally efficient numerical method is presented,
which appears to be extremely robust in practice.