Efficient imaging and real-time display of Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy based on block compressive sensing

Abstract

Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy (SICM) is one kind of Scanning Probe Microscopies (SPMs), and it can be used in mapping topographical features of sample at high - resolution with free contact by measuring the ion current of ultra-micropipette. SICM is widely used in imaging soft samples for many distinct merits, such as high resolution imaging, simple preparation of probe and no harm to sample surface. However, it is undeniable that the scanning speed of SICM is much slower than other SPMs, especially for large scale and high resolution imaging. Fortunately, compressive sensing (CS), which breaks through the Shannon's sampling theorem for dramatically reducing sample rate, could improve scanning speed tremendously, but it still costs much time in image reconstruction. Therefore block compressive sensing was applied to SICM imaging for reducing the reconstruction time of sparse signals, and it has an anther further and unique application that it can achieve the function of image real-time display. In this paper, a new method of dividing blocks and a new matrix arithmetic operation was proposed to build the block compressive sensing model, and several experiments was taken to verified the superiority of block compressive sensing in reducing imaging time and image real-time display used SICM.