Super-Resolution Based on Generative Adversarial Network for HRTEM Images

Abstract

As an important tool to study the microstructure and properties of materials, High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscope (HRTEM) images can obtain the lattice fringe image (reflecting the crystal plane spacing information), structure image and individual atom image (which reflects the configuration of atoms or atomic groups in crystal structure). Despite the rapid development of HTTEM devices, HRTEM images still have limited achievable resolution for human visual system. With the rapid development of deep learning technology in recent years, researchers are actively exploring the Super-resolution (SR) model based on deep learning, and the model has reached the current best level in various SR benchmarks. Using SR to reconstruct high-resolution HRTEM image is helpful to the material science research. However, there is one core issue that has not been resolved: most of these super-resolution methods require the training data to exist in pairs. In actual scenarios, especially for HRTEM images, there are no corresponding HR images. To reconstruct high quality HRTEM image, a novel Super-Resolution architecture for HRTEM images is proposed in this paper. Borrowing the idea from Dual Regression Networks (DRN), we introduce an additional dual regression structure to ESRGAN, by training the model with unpaired HRTEM images and paired nature images. Results of extensive benchmark experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves better performance than the most resent SISR methods with both quantitative and visual results.