| Electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) is a recognized characterization technique for the scanning electron microscope. Over the last quarter century, several major advancements improved this technique and expanded its applications to the fields of materials engineering and geological science. These improvements have been primarily related to the commercialization of EBSD systems. With their conviviality and ease of use, these systems have reached a broad audience and have contributed to the maturation of EBSD. However, from another perspective, they have also limited the development by the EBSD community: researchers facing atypical problems do not have the opportunity to modify and improve commercial systems to meet their specific needs. Innovation is left to the scientists and engineers working at EBSD companies. This work offers a solution to this problem by the development of an open source, freely available software, EBSD-Image, for processing of diffraction patterns acquired by an EBSD system.;Furthermore, this work presents tools to validate new algorithms via the generation of simulated diffraction patterns as well as utilities to process and analyze large data sets on a distributed computing grid. Two file formats are introduced to provide a more practical way of processing large numbers of diffraction pattern image files and to share the results of an analysis. Finally, an equation linking the two resolutions of the Hough transform for diffraction patterns of any size and a method to remove artifacts created by vertical Kikuchi bands in the Hough space are proposed.;Built on top of image analysis software, EBSD-Image provides a flexible and structured interface to implement new algorithms to process and extract information from diffraction patterns. Two applications are given to demonstrate the analytical benefits of the software. In one application, the calculation of different metrics to evaluate diffraction quality led to a more accurate characterization of the microstructure of Zr-2.5Nb pressure tubes. In the other, quantitative measurements of the deformation induced during metallographic specimen preparation were made, in addition to the development of a new quality metric to assess the deformation level in a sample. |
