Authors:
Po-Yi Li
1
;
Chia-Jen Liu
2
;
Cheng-Kuan Lin
3
and
Yu-Chee Tseng
3
Affiliations:
1
Department of Biological Science and Technology, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
;
2
Institute of Emergency and Critical Care Medicine, School of Medicine, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
;
3
Department of Computer Science, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Keyword(s):
auto-focus measurement, gradient-based operators, image processing.
Abstract:
Blood testing has always been an important indicator for judging patients’ states and various types of lesions. The typical way to observe the blood sample is by having medical personnel operate the conventional microscope and classify the white blood cells in a patient’s blood sample. However, such a long period of observation may cause visual fatigue. As a result, we built an automated microscope system to ensure the efficiency of the observation. In addition, focus measurement has always been a huge topic in the auto-focus method, which we implemented in the system. We proposed an automatic focus algorithm based on the gradient operator and colorfulness value to fit with the automated microscope system. The color-gradient operator is compared to conventional operators such as Laplacian-based, Wavelet-based, and DCT energy-based. By taking advantage of the three components in the color-gradient operator, the standard of determining a microscope image consists of both sharpness and
colorfulness. The experimental results showed that the proposed microscope automatic focus algorithm is significantly stable in all real-life blood cell microscope image dataset scenarios. Such performance is discussed in specific situations that happened only in microscope auto-focus measurements.
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