ACQUISITION OF HIGH-RESOLUTION DIGITAL IMAGES IN VIDEO MICROSCOPY - AUTOMATED IMAGE MOSAICKING ON A DESK-TOP MICROCOMPUTER

For the digital processing of microscopical images, mosaicking is a pr erequisite if the specimen is larger than the camera field at the nece ssary magnification. This study investigates the possibilities and Lim itations of fully automated mosaicking on a desktop computer. Crosscor relation-based frame registration was performed with high reliability if the video fi ames were edge-enhanced before matched filtering, and also in a reasonable time since the search for matches was restricted to pairs of consecutive frames. An environment for routine mosaicking was developed and implemented in a widely used desktop image-processin g program. The software developed during this study has been released to the public domain. (C) 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.