Novel Micro Scanning with Integrated Atomic Force Microscope and Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope

Integrated atomic force microscope (AFM) and confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM) can quickly obtain the three-dimensional (3-D) surface of the sample in large scanning range and recover the region of interesting (ROI) in nanoscale resolution. However, the traditional cooperative algorithm for integrated microscopes occupies too much scanning time. In this work, we develop a novel cooperative algorithm for the integrated microscopes to reduce scanning time of AFM and achieve higher scanning speed. First, the calibration of the microscopes will be implemented. Next, CLSM starts a large range scan first and then define the region of interesting (ROI) by edge detection. And then, the scan regions of the AFM are arranged based on the ROI and adaptive scanning region method is proposed to reduce the scanning time. Furthermore, variable speed scanning based on the height information obtained from CLSM image is applied to increase the AFM scanning speed. Finally, the scanning images obtained from AFM and CLSM are merged together. A series of experimental results show that proposed cooperative algorithm can save approximately 69.2% of scanning time compared with that obtained by traditional cooperative algorithm.