Vol. 46, Issue 4, pp. 651-663

Abstract

A disparity servoing based fast autofocusing method is proposed for stereomicroscopes according to linear relationship between the disparity change in stereomicroscopic images and the move distance of a motorized translation stage. For a certain stereomicroscope, the calibration of a disparity range of clear images at each magnification is implemented offline. After that, the disparity of the stereomicroscopic image is used as an index to represent the sharpness of an arbitrary image. If the disparity does not satisfy the requirement, move steps and direction of a step motor are calculated by utilizing the linear relationship between the disparity change and the move distance of the stage. The iteration will be continued until the disparity of the captured stereomicroscopic image approximates to the clearest disparity. The experimental results show that the proposed method only requires a few iterations and less time to reach the focus position, and the disparity error is less than 0.5 pixel.