  Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is ubiquitous in nanoscale science allowing
the observation of features in real space down to the angstrom resolution. The
scanning nature of SPM, wherein a sharp tip rasters the surface during which a
physical setpoint is maintained via a control feedback loop, often implies that
the image is subject to drift effects, leading to distortion of the resulting
image. While there are \emph{in-operando} methods to compensate for the drift,
correcting the residual linear drift in obtained images is often neglected. In
this paper, we present a reciprocal space-based technique to compensate the
linear drift in atomically-resolved scanning probe microscopy images without
distinction of the fast and slow scanning directions; furthermore this method
does not require the set of SPM images obtained for the different scanning
directions. Instead, the compensation is made possible by the a priori
knowledge of the lattice parameters. The method can also be used to
characterize and calibrate the SPM instrument.
