Method of improving image sharpness for annular-illumination scanning electron microscopes

Annular illumination is effective in enhancing the depth of focus for scanning electron microscopes (SEMs). However, owing to high side lobes of the point-spread function (PSF), annular illumination results in poor image sharpness. The conventional deconvolution method, which converts the PSF to a delta function, can improve image sharpness, but results in artifacts due to noise amplification. In this paper, we propose an image processing method that can reduce the deterioration of image sharpness. With this method, the PSF under annular illumination is converted to that under standard illumination. Through simulations, we verified that the image sharpness of SEM images under annular illumination with the proposed method can be improved without noise amplification.