Optimized graph-based mosaicking for virtual microscopy

Virtual microscopy has the potential to partially replace traditional microscopy. For virtualization, the slide is scanned once by a fully automatized robotic microscope and saved digitally. Typically, such a scan results in several hundreds to thousands of fields of view. Since robotic stages have positioning errors, these fields of view have to be registered locally and globally in an additional step. In this work we propose a new global mosaicking method for the creation of virtual slides based on sub-pixel exact phase correlation for local alignment in combination with Prim's minimum spanning tree algorithm for global alignment. Our algorithm allows for a robust reproduction of the original slide even in the presence of views with little to no information content. This makes it especially suitable for the mosaicking of cervical smears. These smears often exhibit large empty areas, which do not contain enough information for common stitching approaches.