Most specimens that are observed with a microscope have small variations in height across their surfaces. While these variations are frequently not visible to the human eye, they can cause images of a portion of a specimen captured by a microscope to be out of focus.
The range in which a microscope can create a usable focused image is known as the depth of field. The microscope must keep a portion of a specimen within its depth of field to generate useful images. However, when transitioning from observing a first portion of a specimen to observing a second portion of the specimen, the small variations in height of the specimen may cause the second portion to be outside the depth of field.
Different sharpness measurements such as image contrast, resolution, entropy and/or spatial frequency content, among others, can be used to measure the quality of focus of images captured by a microscope. Generally, when a specimen is in focus, the captured image will exhibit the best sharpness quality (e.g., large contrast, a high range of intensity values and sharp edges). The different sharpness measurements that can be used to determine when a specimen is in focus usually require capturing a series of images and increasing or decreasing the distance between the microscope objective lens and the specimen until the image appears in focus. This increases the total microscopic scan time of each specimen, making methods using such measurement prohibitively slow for high throughput scanning applications.
Accordingly, it is desirable to find a suitable in-focus plane of a specimen using a smaller number of images.