Atomic force microscopy wide-field scanning imaging using homography matrix optimization

During the offline combination of multiple atomic force microscopy (AFM) images, changes in probe displacement can be affected by dynamic noise, leading to dislocation and tearing in the stitching. To overcome this, we designed a homography matrix optimization method to describe the relative positional relationship between images by constructing the original image matrix and applying singular value decomposition to denoise the homography matrix. Additionally, we implemented a scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) to extract feature points. To verify the effectiveness of this method, the SIFT + RANSAC (R), SIFT + affine transformation (AT), and oriented FAST and rotated BRIEF (ORB) algorithms were compared with the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method precisely computes the transformation matrix, thereby guaranteeing the geometric consistency of mosaic imaging. The proposed method preserves the intricate details of the original image and enhances the stitching quality of wide-field images. [Display omitted] •Method developed to splice wide-field images using optimized homography matrix.•Singular value decomposition method used to solve the image homography matrix.•Features extracted using scale-invariant feature and optimal affine transformations.•Method showed significant improvements compared with existing methods.