Version 0.91 was released on June 24th, 2010.
Download the new version form download section of this website.
For examples and function reference see the Wiki.
The Artificial Scanning-Charged-Particle-Microscope Image Generator (ARTIMAGEN) is a library that can generate artificial images of various samples, including gold-on-carbon resolution sample, or some semiconductor structures. ARTIMAGEN was originally developed for scanning electron microscopy (SEM), but now it is applicable in helium-ion microscopy as well. Numerous effects that appear in real instruments are simulated (noise, drift-distortion, edge-effect, etc.), which enables assessment of imaging, metrology or other techniques that work with micrographs. Unlike the real images, the artificial images exhibit defined types and amounts of these effects, which is their key advantage.
The Artificial Image Generator has been developed by Petr Cizmar at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The first version of the generator was written in C to evaluate the ISO-candidate image-sharpness-calculation techniques. Later, the Artificial Image Generator became needed for other applications as well and support for new kinds of samples was added. In order to make the generator more flexible, it was rewritten to C++. The users now may take advantage of the modular object structure of the program.
At this time, also programs written in C or other languages may be linked with the library, which is enabled by the C wrapper. The basic usage of the library is quite easy (see the Howto).
As an example of the ARTIMAGEN library usage, the gAIG program was written, which is a GUI front end to the library (demonstrating just the basic usage). It can be obtained from the download section. The program is multi-platform, it can be compiled for Windows32, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit versions), MacOSX, and others (untested).
The scientific background of this
software is described in the
following publications:
[1] P. Cizmar, A. E. Vladar, B. Ming, and M. T. Postek.
Simulated SEM Images for Resolution Measurement.
SCANNING, 30(5):381391, Sep-Oct 2008.
[2] P. Cizmar, A. E. Vladar, and M. T. Postek.
Optimization of Accurate SEM Imaging by Use of
Artificial Images
Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7378 737815-1, May 2009
This program uses the standard GNU Autotools toolkit, the installation procedure is standard:
./configure make && make installIn order to compile libartimagen as a shared library, use "./configure --enable-shared" instead of "./configure". However, it is not recommended, since shared libraries must be compiled as the Position Independent Code, which is in case of this library (with use of the gcc-4.3.3 compiler) producing significantly less optimized code