Image Processing and Microscope Autofocus

Hello!

I am new to programming, and am having some trouble with a program I'm working on. I'm attempting to write a plugin to autofocus a lab microscope in MATLAB. I have so far written one function that, given the name of an image as a string, will compute the image's "focus index," and a second function that, given a list of image names as strings, will return an array with the focus index of the associated image as the respective element of the array (for example, the "focus index" of the 7th image in the list will be the seventh entry of the array). Ideally, this program should be able to take a set of images, determine which is the most focused, and then move the objective lens to the z-position of that image. While the function can successfully assign the largest focus index to the best focused image, I'm completely lost on where to go from there. Any help or suggestions would be very much appreciated! :) (and if it's relevant, the microscopy software I'm using is ValeLabs' micro-manager)

-Baonai

[Shlok Sharma]

any chance you figured out an algorithm that works?

pls let me know iam also working on a similar project.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Go here for a description of how to attain focus automatically: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-focus For example you could look for maximum contrast - that's one of the methods it discusses.