PEBBLES and PEBBLEJUGGLER : software for accurate, unbiased, and fast measurement and analysis of nanoparticle morphology from Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) micrographs

Pebbles is a user-friendly software program which implements an accurate, unbiased, and fast method to measure the morphology of a population of nanoparticles (NPs) from TEM micrographs. The morphological parameters of the projected NP shape are obtained by fitting intensity models to the TEM micrograph. Pebbles can be used either in automatic mode, where both fitting and validation are reliably carried out with minimal human intervention, and in manual mode, where the user has full control on the fitting and validation steps. Accuracy in diameter measurement has been shown to be ≲1%. When operated in automatic mode, Pebbles can be very fast. The effective speed of 1 NP s -1 has been achieved in favorable cases (packed monolayer of NPs). Since Pebbles is based on a local modeling procedure, it successfully treats cases such as low contrast NPs, NPs with significant diffraction scattering, and inhomogeneous background which often make conventional thresholding procedures fail. Pebbles is accompanied by PebbleJuggler, a software program for the statistical analysis of the sets of best-fit NP models created by Pebbles. Effort has been devoted to make Pebbles and PebbleJuggler the most user-friendly and the least user-tedious we could. Pebbles and PebbleJuggler are available at http://pebbles.istm.cnr.it.