Grid-Based Focus Stacking In Microscopic Photography : Utilizing Grid Systems For Noise Reduction

Microscope cameras possess high zoom capabilities and are frequently used for quality control in various industries. Visus Technology is a company that manufactures and sells these cameras, along with control software. The problem is that these cameras can only be set to one focus depth at a time. Therefore, we were tasked with implementing a fast focus stacking algorithm that combines multiple input images with different focus depths, resulting in a composite image with consistent focus throughout. This will later be integrated into the control software. We initially approached the problem by choosing pixels with the highest Laplacian intensity. This resulted in very noisy output images since the blurry images could sometimes produce high-intensity pixels where they were not supposed to be. To address this, we implemented a grid-based focus stacking algorithm. The algorithm divides the input images into tiles, filtering out the blurriest tiles to exclude them from the stacking process. The result is a composite image with significantly reduced blur.