Uniformity analysis in nanocrystalline silver thin films using fuzzy inference system

An automatic and efficient technique to analyze the uniformity of nanoscale images using wavelets, feature similarity index measure (FSIM) and fuzzy inference system is reported. It has been successfully tested on scanning electron micrographs of nanocrystalline silver thin films. Thin films are prepared using on‐axis and off‐axis pulse laser deposition (PLD) technique. It is found that the film prepared using on‐axis PLD is more uniformly distributed and has smoother texture compared with that of the off‐axis technique. In order to analyze the images quantitatively, they are transformed to the wavelet domain to extract the localized frequency variations and a uniformity measure is derived using a fuzzy inference system for quantitatively analyzing the uniformity of each image. The surface plot of the FSIM values of the image is found to be an efficient tool for nanoscientists to evaluate the smoothness of the thin film surfaces. This study is expected to help the nanoscientists to understand these nanostructures in detail. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.