Digital restoration of scanning electrochemical microscope images

Images obtained from the scanning electrochemical microscope (SECM) have been restored by digital computer techniques. SECM images are inherently blurred by the diffusion process that occurs in the oxidation-reduction reaction at the probe tip. Restoration of an image of the bottom surface of a Ligustrum sinensis leaf as well as the image of a conductive inverse indium tin oxide grid structure is described here. The authors present two techniques for restoring SECM images. The first is an inverse filtering technique and the second is a smoothed Taylor series approximation of the unblurred image via a modification of a procedure given in Rosenfeld and Kak.