Deep Learning Supersampled Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy

Abstract: Compressed sensing can increase resolution, and decrease electron dose and scan time of electron microscope point-scan systems with minimal information loss. Building on a history of successful deep learning applications in compressed sensing, we have developed a two-stage multiscale generative adversarial network to supersample scanning transmission electron micrographs with point-scan coverage reduced to 1/16, 1/25, ..., 1/100 px. We propose a novel non-adversarial learning policy to train a unified generator for multiple coverages and introduce an auxiliary network to homogenize prioritization of training data with varied signal-to-noise ratios. This achieves root mean square errors of 3.23% and 4.54% at 1/16 px and 1/100 px coverage, respectively; within 1% of errors for networks trained for each coverage individually. Detailed error distributions are presented for unified and individual coverage generators, including errors per output pixel. In addition, we present a baseline one-stage network for a single coverage and investigate numerical precision for web serving. Source code, training data, and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Jeffrey-Ede/DLSS-STEM