Mosaic mapping in Probe Image

[John Donovan]

Did you know you can take randomly acquired images and "mosaic" them together with just a few mouse clicks?

Here are some BSE images obtained by "walking" around the boundary of a grain. Or acquire them automatically.



Now using the Mosaic menu as seen here:



One can obtain the following mosaic by simply clicking on each image you want to include and then OK. ProbeImage figures it all out for you based on the real world stage coordinates of each pixel:



Even if each image is a different size, mag or stage extents... 

[Gareth D Hatton]

Has anyone tried this?  Seems like a really powerful addition to PI.  I do some large area maps and think that this would be really good to avoid defocusing. I just wonder if there is a quick way to mosaic multiple elements or do I have to do them one at a time?

[John Donovan]

Hi Gareth,
Good idea!

We'll modify the manual mosaic feature to automatically mosaic all x-ray maps  in the current folder, if they are present,  that have corresponding acquisition numbers...
john

[Probeman]

Here's a "blast from the past" that I found going through some old 3.5" floppy disks...



It's a very early example of an automatically acquired mosaic of a K-T boundary sample (W. Alvarez) from the old MicroImage software using beam scanning and stage motion on my old Cameca SX51 at UC Berkeley. It might be one of the earliest examples of automatic stage/beam mosaic acquisition. The image isn't suitable for publication due to the Bragg defocusing visible in each "sub-image" (I should have used a higher beam scan magnification), but it's not too bad for the time (~20 years ago!).

I do remember that when Pat Campos (Oxford) visited my lab back then and saw that image on the wall and asked: "how did you do that?"   
john

[orlandin]

I am going to attempt to necro this thread to ask what the current thinking on the PI side is on adding an automatically-generated grid of stage coordinate positions for mosaic-ing (mosaic'd?) beam maps - wouldn't that be cool? It would really complement the automatic stitching shown above nicely! I realize that I am spoiled by this feature on Oxford Instrument's Aztec software, but I think there are times when it might be very handy to have dozens or hundreds of small area beam sub-maps stitched together. Depending on your stage speeds, it might allow scanning large areas significantly faster than an equivalent stage scan.

[John Donovan]

Hi Phil,
Yes, we use Thermo Pathfinder for exactly the same thing- mosaic spectrum image mapping of large areas. The main problem is that although one can extract phases from each sub map spectrum image, one cannot extract phases from the entire mosaiced area due to its size.

As for digitizing a grid of points for acquisition in Probe Image that is something we could look into. Another option, though not with x-rays, is acquiring BSE mosaic images using the Stage application as shown here:

https://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=324.0

The high Z phases usually stand out.

[orlandin]

Oh, that is so cool! And it actually looks quite a bit more flexible and easy to use than the quite pricey add-on which does the same thing in the Oxford Instruments software. I had not seen that capability of Stage, and clearly I need to explore these sub-programs a bit more. Thank you for pointing this out!