Confocal microscopy based on dual blur depth measurement.

In this paper, we propose a confocal microscopy based on dual blur depth measurement (DBCM). The first blur is defocus blur, and the second blur is artificial convolutional blur. First, the DBCM blurs the defocus image using a known Gaussian kernel and calculates the edge gradient ratio between it and the re-blurred image. Then, the axial measurement of edge positions is based on a calibration measurement curve. Finally, depth information is inferred from the edges using the original image. Experiments show that the DBCM can achieve depth measurement in a single image. In a 10×/0.25 objective, the error measured for a step sample of 4.7397 µm is 0.23 µm. The relative error rate is 4.8%.

Confocal microscopy multi-focus image fusion method based on axial information guidance.

Aiming at the problems of poor anti-interference of existing pixel-level fusion rules and low efficiency of transform domain fusion rules, this study proposes a confocal microscopic multi-focus image fusion method (IGCM) based on differential confocal axial information guidance. Unlike traditional multi-focus image fusion (MFIF) methods, IGCM uses height information rather than grayscale or frequency to determine clear areas. First, the differential confocal axial measurement curve is calibrated to determine the suitable scan step u. Second, the image set required for fusion is constructed by performing a hierarchical scan of the measurement samples. Then, multiple differential image pairs are constructed using the step size u and the set of images, and the extraction area of the current reference image is decided based on the height obtained from the differential image. Finally, the regions determined by each reference image are extracted and the duplicated pixels are averaged to obtain the MFIF image. The results were that IGCM improves the interference immunity based on pixel-level image fusion compared to the maximum peak fusion method. Compared with other MFIFs, IGCM has excellent fusion efficiency while ensuring fusion clarity, which can meet the application scenario of real-time fusion and offers a new approach to panoramic depth images for confocal devices.