Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is widely used in the science of
materials and different parameters were developed to characterize the
surface roughness. In a previous work, we studied the surface topography
with fractal dimension at low scale and two parameters at high scale by
using the variogram, that is, variance vs. step log–log graph, of a
SEM image. Those studies were carried out with the FERImage program,
previously developed by us. To verify the previously accepted hypothesis
by working with only an image, it is indispensable to have reliable
three-dimensional (3D) surface data. In this work, a new program
(EZEImage) to characterize 3D surface topography in SEM has been
developed. It uses fast cross correlation and dynamic programming to
obtain reliable dense height maps in a few seconds which can be displayed
as an image where each gray level represents a height value. This image
can be used for the FERImage program or any other software to obtain
surface topography characteristics. EZEImage also generates anaglyph
images as well as characterizes 3D surface topography by means of a
parameter set to describe amplitude properties and three functional
indices for characterizing bearing and fluid properties.