Feature-based registration of sectional images
First Claim
1. A method for obtaining at least one corresponding image pair from at least two adjacent sections A and B of a specimen, said method comprising the steps of:
- a) obtaining a superimage of at least part of section A and a superimage of at least part of section B, wherein a superimage is an image of a section comprising all image fields and an image field is an area of the image to be analysed;
b) carrying out an image registration process on the two superimages by establishing correspondence between features of the two related superimages, so as to obtain a mathematical transformation rule,c) identifying an image field within section A;
d) using said mathematical transformation rule to identify an area within section B, said area comprising an image field within section B corresponding to said image field within section A, and adding a minimum guard zone to each border of said area in section B;
e) obtaining an image of said image field within section A identified in step c) and obtaining an image of said image field within section B identified in step d) and carrying out a second registration process on the two images to obtain a registered corresponding image pair;
f) optionally repeating steps c)-e) one or more times to obtain one or more different corresponding image pair(s) of one or more different image fields in the two sections A and B;
g) storing a digitized version of said registered corresponding image pair(s) in a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium; and
wherein the superimages of step a) are obtained using a lower resolution than the resolution used to obtain the images of step e).
1 Assignment
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
The present invention relates to a method and a system for obtaining and analysing image pairs, obtained as sections of specimen. The invention facilitates registration of two corresponding images, one from each section of the specimen. The invention includes performing a registration process of the two images thereby obtaining a mathematical transformation rule and afterwards using said transformation rule for each image field identified in one image allowing that the corresponding image field in the other image may be identified as well. After the corresponding image pairs have been obtained using the method of the present invention, the sections can be assessed, such as by identifying the counting events for at least one type of object on the image fields within at least one corresponding image pair, optionally using automatic means.
-
Citations
17 Claims
-
1. A method for obtaining at least one corresponding image pair from at least two adjacent sections A and B of a specimen, said method comprising the steps of:
-
a) obtaining a superimage of at least part of section A and a superimage of at least part of section B, wherein a superimage is an image of a section comprising all image fields and an image field is an area of the image to be analysed; b) carrying out an image registration process on the two superimages by establishing correspondence between features of the two related superimages, so as to obtain a mathematical transformation rule, c) identifying an image field within section A; d) using said mathematical transformation rule to identify an area within section B, said area comprising an image field within section B corresponding to said image field within section A, and adding a minimum guard zone to each border of said area in section B; e) obtaining an image of said image field within section A identified in step c) and obtaining an image of said image field within section B identified in step d) and carrying out a second registration process on the two images to obtain a registered corresponding image pair; f) optionally repeating steps c)-e) one or more times to obtain one or more different corresponding image pair(s) of one or more different image fields in the two sections A and B; g) storing a digitized version of said registered corresponding image pair(s) in a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium; and wherein the superimages of step a) are obtained using a lower resolution than the resolution used to obtain the images of step e). - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17)
-
Specification