Adaptive Partial Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy with Reinforcement Learning

Compressed sensing is applied to scanning transmission electron microscopy to decrease electron dose and scan time. However, established methods use static sampling strategies that do not adapt to samples. We have extended recurrent deterministic policy gradients to train deep LSTMs and differentiable neural computers to adaptively sample scan path segments. Recurrent agents cooperate with a convolutional generator to complete partial scans. We show that our approach outperforms established algorithms based on spiral scans, and we expect our results to be generalizable to other scan systems. Source code, pretrained models and training data is available at https://github.com/Jeffrey-Ede/Adaptive-Partial-STEM.