Simultaneous Drift Calibration and Reconstruction for Scanning-Probe X-Ray Tomography

Abstract

Scanning-probe x-ray tomography is useful for imaging nanoscale structures of a sample. The image resolution, which can reach down to 10 nm by the increased brightness and coherence of the x-ray optics, however, is highly susceptible to experimental error. Failure to address these errors can lead to a smeared image and, in the worst case, to misinterpretation of the imaged object's structure. In this work, we present a novel optimization-based approach to calibrate a common yet challenging source of experimental error, the drifts of the scanning positions, while simultaneously reconstructing the object. This approach uses the coupled and complementary information from different measurements to enforce consistency between the measurements and the reconstruction. We illustrate the proposed approach on both synthetic and real tomography images and show its superior performance compared with reconstruction without explicit error calibration.