Correction of distortion due to thermal drift in scanning probe microscopy

A common source of distortion in scanning probe microscope (SPM) images is “thermal drift,” the slow thermal expansion of different materials in the sample and microscope due to small changes in temperature over the course of a scan. We describe here a method for correcting this distortion by immediately following each image scan with a rescan of a small, narrow portion of the same area with the slow and fast scan axes reversed. The original, full image is corrected using a low-order polynomial mapping function, with coefficients determined by a pixel-wise comparison between the original full and rescanned partial images. We demonstrate here that this method can correctly remove distortion from a wide range of images with a precision of better than one pixel, and is also robust to common imaging artifacts. We also address some of the programming considerations that have gone into implementing this computationally intensive technique, which can now be performed using standard desktop hardware in times that range between a few seconds and a few minutes.