Interface structure is of major interest in microscopy. With high resolution transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) and scanning probe microscopes, it is possible to reveal structure of interfaces in unit cells, in some cases with atomic resolution. A. Ourmazd et al. proposed quantifying such observations by using vector pattern recognition to map chemical composition changes across the interface in TEM images with unit cell resolution. The sensitivity of the mapping process, however, is limited by the repeatability of unit cell images of perfect crystal, and hence by the amount of delocalized noise, e.g. due to ion milling or beam radiation damage. Bayesian removal of noise, based on statistical inference, can be used to reduce the amount of non-periodic noise in images after acquisition. The basic principle of Bayesian phase-model background subtraction, according to our previous study, is that the optimum (rms error minimizing strategy) Fourier phases of the noise can be obtained provided the amplitudes of the noise is given, while the noise amplitude can often be estimated from the image itself.
