Enhancing performance of electron holography with mathematical and machine learning–based denoising techniques

Abstract Electron holography is a useful tool for analyzing functional properties, such as electromagnetic fields and strains of materials and devices. The performance of electron holography is limited by the ‘shot noise’ inherent in electron micrographs (holograms), which are composed of a finite number of electrons. A promising approach for addressing this issue is to use mathematical and machine learning–based image-processing techniques for hologram denoising. With the advancement of information science, denoising methods have become capable of extracting signals that are completely buried in noise, and they are being applied to electron microscopy, including electron holography. However, these advanced denoising methods are complex and have many parameters to be tuned; therefore, it is necessary to understand their principles in depth and use them carefully. Herein, we present an overview of the principles and usage of sparse coding, the wavelet hidden Markov model and tensor decomposition, which have been applied to electron holography. We also present evaluation results for the denoising performance of these methods obtained through their application to simulated and experimentally recorded holograms. Our analysis, review and comparison of the methods clarify the impact of denoising on electron holography research.