Dr. Stuart Wright, Senior Scientist EBSD, EDAX

I was recently asked to write a “Tips & Tricks” article for the EDAX Insight Newsletter as I had recently done an EDAX Webinar (www.edax.com/news-events/webinars) on Texture Analysis. I decided to follow up on one item I had emphasized in the Webinar. Namely, the need for sampling enough orientations for statistical reliability in characterizing a texture. The important thing to remember is that it is the number of grain orientations as opposed to the number of orientations measured. But that lead to the introduction of the idea of sub-sampling a dataset to calculate textures when the datasets are very large. Unfortunately, there was not enough room to go into the kind of detail I would have liked to so I’ve decided to use our Blog forum to cover some details about sub-sampling that I found interesting

Consider the case where you not only want to characterize the texture of a material but also the grain size or some other microstructural characteristic requiring a relatively fine microstructure relative to the grain size. According to some previous work, to accurately capture the texture you will want to measure approximately 10,000 grains [1] and about 500 pixels per average grain in order to capture the grain size well [2]. This would result in a scan with approximately 5 million datapoints. Instead of calculating the texture using all 5 million data points, you can use a sub-set of the points to speed up the calculation. In our latest release of OIM Analysis, this is not as big of a concern as it once was as the texture calculations have been multithreaded so they are fast even for very large datasets. Nonetheless, since it is very likely that you will want to calculate the grain size, you can use the area weighted average grain orientation for each grain as opposed to using all 5 million individual orientation measurements for some quick texture calculation. Alternatively, a sub-set of the points through random or uniform sampling of the points in the scan area could be used.

Of course, you may wonder how well the sub-sampling works. I have done a little study on a threaded rod from a local hardware store to test these ideas. The material exhibits a (110) fiber texture as can be seen in the Normal Direction IPF map and accompanying (110) pole figure. For these measurements I have simply done a normalized squared difference point-by-point through the Orientation Distribution Function (ODF) which we call the Texture Difference Index (TDI) in the software.

This is a good method because it allows us to compare textures calculated using different methods (e.g. series expansion vs binning). In this study, I have used the general spherical harmonics series expansion with a rank of L = 22 and a Gaussian half-width of  = 0.1°. The dataset has 105,287 points with 92.5% of those having a CI > 0.2 after CI Standardization. I have elected only to use points with CI > 0.2. The results are shown in the following figure.

As the step size is relatively coarse with respect to the grain size, I have experimented with using grains requiring at least two pixels before considering a set of similarly oriented points a grain versus allowing a single pixel to be a grain. This resulted in 9981 grains and 25,437 grains respectively. In both cases, the differences in the textures between these two grain-based sub-sampling approaches with respect to using the full dataset are small with the 1 pixel grain based sub-sampling being slight closer as would be expected. However, the figure above raised two questions for me: (1) what do the TDI numbers mean and (2) why do the random and the uniform sampling grids differ so much, particularly as the number of points in the sub-sampling gets large (i.e. at 25% of the dataset).

TDI
The pole figure for the 1000 random points in the previous figure certainly captures some of the characteristics of the pole figure for the full dataset. Is this reflected in the TDI measurements? My guess is that if I were to calculate the textures at a lesser rank, something like L = 8 then the TDI’s would go down. This is already part of the TDI calculation and so it is an easy thing to examine. For comparison I have chosen to look at four different datasets: (a) all of the data in the dataset above (named “fine”), (b) a dataset from the same material with a coarser step size (“coarse”) containing approximately 150,000 data points, (c) sub-sampling of the original dataset using 1000 randomly sampled datapoints (“fine-1000”) and (d) the “coarse” dataset rotated 90 degrees about the vertical axis in the pole figures (“coarse-rotated”). It is interesting to note that the textures that are similar “by-eye” show a general increase in the TDI as the series expansion rate increases. However, for very dissimilar textures (i.e “coarse” vs “coarse-rotated”) the jump to a large TDI is immediate.

Random vs Uniform Sampling
The differences between the random and uniform sampling were a bit curious so I decided to check the random points to see how they were positioned in the x-y space of the scan. The figure below compares the uniform and random sampling for 4000 datapoints – any more than this is hard to show. Clearly the random sampling is reasonable but does show a bit of clustering and gaps within the scan area. Some of these small differences show up with higher differences in TDI values than I would expect. Clearly, at L = 22 we are picking up quite subtle differences – at least subtle with respect to my personal “by-eye” judgement. It seems to me, that my “by-eye” judgement is biased toward lower rank series expansions.

Of course, another conclusion would be that my eyesight is getting rank with age ☹ I guess that explains my increasingly frequent need to reach for my reading glasses.

References
[1] SI Wright, MM Nowell & JF Bingert (2007) “A comparison of textures measured using X-ray and electron backscatter diffraction”. Metallurgical and Materials Transactions A, 38, 1845-1855
[2] SI Wright (2010) “A Parametric Study of Electron Backscatter Diffraction based Grain Size Measurements”. Practical Metallography, 47, 16-33.