A novel autofocusing method using the angle of Hilbert space for microscopy

Autofocusing technology is indispensable for routine use of microscopes on a large scale in biological field. The autofocusing method using the angle of Hilbert space is brought forward to measure whether the image is focused or not. The angle of Hillbert space can be used to evaluate accurately the similarity degree of two images. The experiment results show that the autofocusing method can decrease the computational cost and get accuracy for real-time biological and biomedical images with noise robustness. The focus curves are smooth and possess the unimodality, the monotonicity and the symmetry. Compared with other classic and optimum focus method, the Hilbert method demonstrates its robustness to noise and can improve the focus speed. The experiments showed that the proposed method can increase the overall performance of an autofocus system and has strong applicability in various autofocusing algorithms.