Searching surface orientation of microscopic objects for accurate 3D shape recovery

In this article, we propose a new shape from focus (SFF) method to estimate 3D shape of microscopic objects using surface orientation cue of each object patch. Most of the SFF algorithms compute the focus value of a pixel from the information of neighboring pixels lying on the same image frame based on an assumption that the small object patch corresponding to the small neighborhood of a pixel is a plane parallel to the focal plane. However, this assumption fails in the optics with limited depth of field where the neighboring pixels of an image have different degree of focus. To overcome this problem, we try to search the surface orientation of the small object patch corresponding to each pixel in the image sequence. Searching of the surface orientation is done indirectly by principal component analysis. Then, the focus value of each pixel is computed from the neighboring pixels lying on the surface perpendicular to the corresponding surface orientation. Experimental results on synthetic and real microscopic objects show that the proposed method produces more accurate 3D shape in comparison to the existing techniques. Microsc. Res. Tech. 2012. (c) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.