Subspace Modeling Enabled High-Sensitivity X-Ray Chemical Imaging

Abstract

Resolving morphological chemical phase transformations at the nanoscale is of vital importance to many scientific and industrial applications across various disciplines. The TXM-XANES imaging technique, by combining full-field transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM) and X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES), has been an emerging tool that operates by acquiring a series of microscopy images with multi-energy X-rays and fitting to obtain the chemical map. Its capability, however, is limited by the poor signal-to-noise ratios due to system errors and low exposure illuminations for fast acquisition. In this work, by exploiting the intrinsic properties and subspace modeling of the TXM-XANES imaging data, we introduce a simple and robust denoising approach to improve the image quality, which enables fast and high-sensitivity chemical characterization. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.