Initial Experimental Results Using an ESEM for Metrology

A methodology is developed to analyze an image sequence acquired by a scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and convert the image information into accurate 3D surface shape and surface deformation measurements. The methodology provides not only the SEM camera model parameters but also simultaneous corrections for a wide range of distortion sources. The method is applied to analyze images obtained at different orientations from a specimen undergoing tensile loading in a specially designed SEM loading stage, where the specimen motions and deformations are recovered a posteriori from only the acquired images.