  In the Reverse Engineering and Hardware Assurance domain, a majority of the
data acquisition is done through electron microscopy techniques such as
Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). However, unlike its counterparts in optical
imaging, only a limited number of techniques are available to enhance and
extract information from the raw SEM images. In this paper, we introduce an
algorithm to segment out Integrated Circuit (IC) structures from the SEM image.
Unlike existing algorithms discussed in this paper, this algorithm is
unsupervised, parameter-free and does not require prior information on the
noise model or features in the target image making it effective in low quality
image acquisition scenarios as well. Furthermore, the results from the
application of the algorithm on various structures and layers in the IC are
reported and discussed.
