autofocus

[pablodn]

Dear all,

I'm working on a setup with a motorized xyz stage, a ccd camera and some other stuff. With the ccd I acquire the image of some material I put on the xyz, moving it on the xy plane and focusing on the z axis. I would like to implement an autofocus feature in my vis, so everytime I move to a new point in the xy plane, the ccd and the z axis work together to focus the image.

I have been searching in the forums but I could not found anything helpful for me.

Could someone show me an example of this or some documents to help me with this task?

Thanks in advance,

Pablo.

[James.M]

We need more information here. What equipment do you have that could do the auto-focusing? Are you using the NI Vision module?

Here's an article using IMAQdx to figure out how focused the camera is.

[pablodn]

Dear Jamie,

Thanks for your reply.

Ok, for auto-focusing I have a Newport lineal motor (model LTA) controlled with a Newport ESP300 motion controller and a Thorlabs camera for acquiring the image. In my setup the position of the camera is fixed and I control the xyz stage position.

I am using the thorlabs LabVIEW interface and IMAQ for getting and saving the images I want but I don't have IMAQdx installed (I don´t know why).

Anyway, the idea I'm getting is that I could build something like the article you showed me and, as a function of the mean value, move the focusing axis. Am I correct?

Cheers,

Pablo.

[James.M]

That's what I would do.

I don't know if you'll need IMAQdx if you are already acquiring images just fine. I don't have an IMAQ license anymore unfortunately so I can't do much with the example I linked to. If the focus algorithm doesn't require IMAQdx then you probably don't need it. IMAQ itself has all of the image analysis tools you should need, whereas IMAQdx is used for the actual image acquisition.

[pablodn]

It looks like I don't really need IMAQdx then. I think I can replace it with the Thorlabs vis. I will work on it.

Thanks for your help,

Pablo.

[flyingstarme2]

Hello, 

    Can you share your program if settled the problem. We are confront with the same problem, how to get autofocus image using xyz stage and ccd

Best regards

flyingstarme2