Automated Stitching of Noisy Scanning Electron Microscopy Images for Integrated Circuit Reverse Engineering

<p>A scanning electron microscope (<strong>SEM</strong>) usually creates images in the range of megapixel resolutions, but analyzing an IC layer requires resolutions in the gigapixel range. To create such large images, many individual images must be taken and then fused into one large image, which poses unique challenges: <strong>SEM</strong> images are affected by distortion due to charging effects and often exhibit high levels of noise and low contrast. One way of reducing the entry barrier to IC reverse engineering is to develop algorithms that can provide good results even in the case of suboptimal image quality, as can be produced by older, more readily available <strong>SEMs</strong>.</p> <p>This dataset contains images and additional information that has been cut from the PAINE paper due to length constraints. It also links to the thesis which served as base for the PAINE paper.</p>