用变分自编码器+期望最大化,解决电镜校准中仿真与现实的差距问题。
Bridging the Simulation-to-Reality Gap in Electron Microscope Calibration via VAE-EM Estimation
- 用VAE从模拟图像中学习低维表征,替代传统单一数值提取
- 联合估计参数映射和最优校准参数,误差减半且更稳定
- 适合需要高精度自动化校准的电镜研究者和工程团队
电子显微镜在多个领域推动了科学突破,但其校准面临成像噪声大、参数空间高维等问题,仅凭单幅图像无法确定最优参数。本文针对扫描透射电镜(STEM)提出基于变分自编码器(VAE)的方法,利用模拟数据训练模型学习图像的低维表征,而非仅提取标量值。进一步采用期望最大化(EM)框架,联合估计从校准参数到编码表示的映射函数及最优参数。通过利用光学系统的对称性,确保联合估计的全局可识别性,实现唯一最优解。在真实电镜上验证表明,该方法速度更快、结果更一致,估计误差降低2倍,且所需观测数更少。此工作显著提升了自动校准性能,展示了VAE在图像信息压缩中的潜力。该框架亦适用于存在仿真-现实差距、且映射非单射的其他逆问题。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Electron microscopy has enabled many scientific breakthroughs across multiple fields. A key challenge is the tuning of microscope parameters based on images to overcome optical aberrations that deteriorate image quality. This calibration problem is challenging due to the high-dimensional and noisy nature of the diagnostic images, and the fact that optimal parameters cannot be identified from a single image. We tackle the calibration problem for Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopes (STEM) by employing variational autoencoders (VAEs), trained on simulated data, to learn low-dimensional representations of images, whereas most existing methods extract only scalar values. We then simultaneously estimate the model that maps calibration parameters to encoded representations and the optimal calibration parameters using an expectation maximization (EM) approach. This joint estimation explicitly addresses the simulation-to-reality gap inherent in data-driven methods that train on simulated data from a digital twin. We leverage the known symmetry property of the optical system to establish global identifiability of the joint estimation problem, ensuring that a unique optimum exists. We demonstrate that our approach is substantially faster and more consistent than existing methods on a real STEM, achieving a 2x reduction in estimation error while requiring fewer observations. This represents a notable advance in automated STEM calibration and demonstrates the potential of VAEs for information compression in images. Beyond microscopy, the VAE-EM framework applies to inverse problems where simulated training data introduces a reality gap and where non-injective mappings would otherwise prevent unique solutions.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。