Crystallographic image processing (CIP) is traditionally understood as being a set of key steps in the determination of the atomic structure of crystalline matter from high-resolution electron microscopy (HREM) images obtained in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) that is run in the parallel illumination mode. The term was created in the research group of Sven Hovmöller at Stockholm University during the early 1980s and became rapidly a label for the "3D crystal structure from 2D transmission/projection images" approach. Since the late 1990s, analogous and complementary image processing techniques that are directed towards the achieving of goals with are either complementary or entirely beyond the scope of the original inception of CIP have been developed independently by members of the computational symmetry/geometry, scanning transmission electron microscopy, scanning probe microscopy communities, and applied crystallography communities.
^T. E. Weirich, From Fourier series towards crystal structures - a survey of conventional methods for solving the phase problem; in: Electron Crystallography - Novel Approaches for Structure Determination of Nanosized Materials, T. E. Weirich, J. L. Lábár, X. Zou, (Eds.), Springer 2006, 235 - 257.