Abstract

The bombardment by electrons of (biological) objects in the electron microscope leads to radiation damage. Accordingly we have to minimize the number of electrons impinging on the object in order to get a reliable image. The image gets a very noisy appearance (shot noise) and the results derived from these images become stochastic quantities of which we would like to obtain the probability distributions. For this program to be carried out we have to know the relation between the image and the object. A schematic of the imaging process is depicted in Fig. 1. The image plane is supposed to be covered by N² ideal electron counters, where N² is the number of degrees of freedom (Shannon number) of the image.

© 1986 Optical Society of America