3D Gaussian Splatting for Annular Dark Field Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Tomography Reconstruction

Analytical Dark Field Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (ADF-STEM) tomography reconstructs nanoscale materials in 3D by integrating multi-view tilt-series images, enabling precise analysis of their structural and compositional features. Although integrating more tilt views improves 3D reconstruction, it requires extended electron exposure that risks damaging dose-sensitive materials and introduces drift and misalignment, making it difficult to balance reconstruction fidelity with sample preservation. In practice, sparse-view acquisition is frequently required, yet conventional ADF-STEM methods degrade under limited views, exhibiting artifacts and reduced structural fidelity. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we adapt 3D GS to this domain with three key components. We first model the local scattering strength as a learnable scalar field, denza, to address the mismatch between 3DGS and ADF-STEM imaging physics. Then we introduce a coefficient $γ$ to stabilize scattering across tilt angles, ensuring consistent denza via scattering view normalization. Finally, We incorporate a loss function that includes a 2D Fourier amplitude term to suppress missing wedge artifacts in sparse-view reconstruction. Experiments on 45-view and 15-view tilt series show that DenZa-Gaussian produces high-fidelity reconstructions and 2D projections that align more closely with original tilts, demonstrating superior robustness under sparse-view conditions.

Statistical Characteristic-Guided Denoising for Rapid High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy Imaging

High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy (HRTEM) enables atomic-scale observation of nucleation dynamics, which boosts the studies of advanced solid materials. Nonetheless, due to the millisecond-scale rapid change of nucleation, it requires short-exposure rapid imaging, leading to severe noise that obscures atomic positions. In this work, we propose a statistical characteristic-guided denoising network, which utilizes statistical characteristics to guide the denoising process in both spatial and frequency domains. In the spatial domain, we present spatial deviation-guided weighting to select appropriate convolution operations for each spatial position based on deviation characteristic. In the frequency domain, we present frequency band-guided weighting to enhance signals and suppress noise based on band characteristics. We also develop an HRTEM-specific noise calibration method and generate a dataset with disordered structures and realistic HRTEM image noises. It can ensure the denoising performance of models on real images for nucleation observation. Experiments on synthetic and real data show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in HRTEM image denoising, with effectiveness in the localization downstream task. Code will be available at https://github.com/HeasonLee/SCGN.

Noise Calibration and Spatial-Frequency Interactive Network for STEM Image Enhancement

Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM) enables the observation of atomic arrangements at sub-angstrom resolution, allowing for atomically resolved analysis of the physical and chemical properties of materials. However, due to the effects of noise, electron beam damage, sample thickness, etc, obtaining satisfactory atomic-level images is often challenging. Enhancing STEM images can reveal clearer structural details of materials. Nonetheless, existing STEM image enhancement methods usually overlook unique features in the frequency domain, and existing datasets lack realism and generality. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we develop noise calibration, data synthesis, and enhancement methods for STEM images. We first present a STEM noise calibration method, which is used to synthesize more realistic STEM images. The parameters of background noise, scan noise, and pointwise noise are obtained by statistical analysis and fitting of real STEM images containing atoms. Then we use these parameters to develop a more general dataset that considers both regular and random atomic arrangements and includes both HAADF and BF mode images. Finally, we design a spatial-frequency interactive network for STEM image enhancement, which can explore the information in the frequency domain formed by the periodicity of atomic arrangement. Experimental results show that our data is closer to real STEM images and achieves better enhancement performances together with our network. Code will be available at https://github.com/HeasonLee/SFIN}{https://github.com/HeasonLee/SFIN.