Dt. Carpenter et al., A METHODOLOGY FOR AUTOMATED QUANTITATIVE MICROSTRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF TRANSMISSION ELECTRON-MICROGRAPHS, Journal of applied physics, 84(11), 1998, pp. 5843-5854
It is generally recognized that proper quantification of microstructur
al behavior is necessary for the optimization of materials properties.
In the specific case of polycrystalline thin films, transmission elec
tron microscopy (TEM) is required for microstructural interrogation du
e to the small (nm-mu m) inherent length scales in these systems. Whil
e a meaningful study requires large grain populations, typical data se
ts are relatively small due to the need for human interpretation of th
e contrast in TEM micrographs. To overcome this limitation, a general
methodology has been developed to fully automate the grain boundary id
entification procedure by using a combination of both conventional and
newly developed image processing algorithms to extract and combine in
formation from multiple, optimized TEM micrographs. This technique has
been validated by systematically analyzing microstructures of thin Al
films, as obtained from TEM micrographs, and comparing these results
with those obtained by a conventional, manual approach. Indeed, a stat
istical analysis shows that the agreement between these two methods is
quite good. We further show that based upon a large population (8185
grains) one can estimate the number of grains required to draw meaning
ful conclusions about this microstructure. While the emphasis of this
work is on TEM image processing, the techniques developed here are exp
ected to be sufficiently general and flexible so as to be applicable t
o other (e.g., focused-ion beam) microscopies. (C) 1998 American Insti
tute of Physics. [S0021-8979(98)02023-4]