A scanning probe microscope comes in a wide variety of flavors, they all produce a set of data points containing the measurements at each location. Usually these data points form a regular 2D grid, but it can be more beneficial to change the density of measurements at certain locations, or even the height, which creates a much more complex probing path and subsequent (XYZ) data set.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://hackaday.com/2024/01/31/low-cost-dsp-for-scanning-probe-microscopy/