Contour extraction of a laser stripe located on a microscope image from a stereo light microscope

A stereo light microscope has a special optical structure that consists of two optical paths. With two cameras fitted on its imaging planes, a microscopic binocular vision system can be constructed, and this system can be applied in three-dimensional (3D) shape measurements of a microscopic object. A novel-shape reconstruction system is developed in this article composed of laser fringe scanning and a stereo light microscope. A laser projector emits a thin light sheet and projects it onto the microscopic object's surface. The microscopic object is placed on a micro-displacement mechanism and moved in a given direction. The entire surface of the object is scanned by the light sheet. This system captures a series of microscopic images of the laser stripe, which are used to restore the 3D shape of the object. In this article, we mainly focus on the study of the laser stripe detection method, which is derived based on the Canny rule. First, the Canny rule outputs pixels at the left and right edges of the laser stripe. Then, a subpixel edge extraction method is proposed based on polynomial fitting that outputs the center curve of the laser stripe. Finally, an edge filter is used to smooth the edge burrs, and the Hermite interpolation method is used to link the broken edges and construct continuous, smoothing edge contours. The results show that this method can effectively find the subpixel position of the laser stripe and output high-quality edge contours. The method is suitable for extracting the contours of a laser stripe located in a microscope image.