Extending the Depth of Field in Microscopy Through Curvelet-Based Frequency-Adaptive Image Fusion

Limited depth of field is an important problem in microscopy imaging. 3D objects are often thicker than the depth of field of the microscope, which means that it is optically impossible to make one single sharp image of them. Instead, different images in which each time a different area of the object is in focus have to be fused together. In this work, we propose a curvelet-based image fusion method that is frequency-adaptive. Because of the high directional sensitivity of the curvelet transform (and consequentially, its extreme sparseness), the average performance gain of the new method over state-of-the-art methods is high.