Patent ID: 8428318

Claim:
A method of averaging a sequence of image frames taken from a living object with a fluorescent imaging technique, said method comprising: applying a noise-reducing filter to said image frames to generate a sequence of filtered frames; applying a deconvolution filter to said sequence of filtered frames to generate a corresponding sequence of deconvolved frames; subjecting said deconvolved frames to a motion-correction transformation to generate a sequence of corrected deconvolved frames, wherein the ith corrected deconvolved frame is represented by J i ref (x,y), J i ref being the intensity at image point (x,y) in the ith corrected deconvolved frame; transforming said filtered frames by an affine transformation to align said filtered frames, thus generating a sequence of aligned frames, wherein an ith aligned frame is represented by I i a (x,y), I i a being the intensity at image point (x,y) in the ith aligned frame; relocating image points in each aligned frame to generate a motion-corrected frame, wherein an ith motion-corrected frame is represented by I i n (x,y), I i n being the intensity at image point (x,y) in the ith motion-corrected frame, I i n (x,y)=I i a (x p ,y p ), and wherein the location (x p ,y p ) is selected such that (i) said location is within a neighborhood centered around (x,y), and (ii) an intensity rank of I i a (x p ,y p ) in said neighborhood and an intensity rank of J i-1 ref (x,y) in said neighborhood are the same, thus generating a sequence of motion-corrected frames; and averaging said motion-corrected frames to generate a resultant frame.