Pixel-by-pixel M_ap(θ) vs. N_ap(θ) comparison for a non-linear bias model (upper panels) and linear bias model (lower panels). The aperture mass and number are calculated except for the outer margins for each individual pixel, which is different to Sect. 5 where is calculated from shear profiles of specific quantiles. To ease the comparison between M_ap(θ) and N_ap(θ) we re-scaled , correspondingly , where ⟨…⟩ is the ensemble average over all pixel positions θ. This re-scaling does not affect the correlation coefficient ρ shown in the upper left corner of each panel. The panels on the left-hand side correspond to the adapted filter, and those on right-hand side to the top-hat filter. For both bias models, the adapted filter yields a stronger correlation, computed with Eq. (20).