Automatic high‐precision measurements of the location and width of Kikuchi bands in electron backscatter diffraction patterns

Abstract

The demands for reliability and precision of crystal orientation data obtained through automatic analysis of electron backscattering patterns (EBSPs) in the SEM result in similar demands on the quality of the band position data which is provided by an image analysis procedure.This paper describes a new image processing procedure which is capable of providing accurate measurements of the location and width of typically 10–15 bands in digitized EBSPs of average quality. The new procedure is based on the Hough transform (HT) for line detection, and employs a special backmapping technique for generating two simplified HTs which separately focus on bright and dark lines in the images. A coordinated search for peaks in the two HTs leads to precise estimates of both the position and the width of bands in the patterns.A visual evaluation of the data produced by the new procedure shows that it performs significantly better than the conventional procedure with regard to both reliability and precision. Additionally, the measured band width data are fairly precise and can be used for obtaining a more robust and reliable indexing of the bands. Finally, the computational costs of the new procedure are smaller than for the conventional procedure.