Patent ID: 7978898
Filing Date: 2011-07-12
Classification: G02B

Abstract:
1. An image acquiring apparatus comprising: macro image acquiring means for acquiring a macro image of a sample; micro image acquiring means for acquiring a micro image of the sample by scanning the sample at a predetermined resolution; image pickup condition setting means for setting, for the sample, an image acquiring range corresponding to an object range including an object of image acquisition by referring to the macro image; and micro image acquisition control means for controlling an operation for acquiring the micro image of the micro image acquiring means, wherein the micro image acquiring means has an image pickup device capable of acquiring a one-dimensional image or a two-dimensional image and sets one direction on an image pickup plane in the image pickup device as a scanning direction for acquiring the micro image, the micro image acquisition control means performs control so that a partial image is acquired by scanning the sample in the scanning direction by the image pickup device and a plurality of partial images that become the micro image are acquired by repeating this partial image acquisition a plurality of times while changing an image pickup position along another direction of the image pickup plane, and in setting of the image acquiring range, the image pickup condition setting means binarizes the macro image, performs erosion processing for reducing the mass of a picture and dilation processing for enlarging the mass of a picture to the image of the object in the binarized macro image for discriminating the object range, and then sets the image acquiring range based on the discriminated object range, and wherein when at least a first object and a second object are discriminated as the object, the image pickup condition setting means sets a first image acquiring range and a second image acquiring range for the sample by dividing an image of the sample between an image of the first object and an image of the second object, and in dividing the image of the sample, the image pickup condition setting means sets a boundary between the first object and the second object, obtained by applying dilation processing to the image of the first object and the image of the second object, as a dividing line for the first image acquiring range and the second image acquiring range.