Patent ID: 8712116

Claim:
A method of generating a digital representation of a portion of an object from sets of digital data defining colour content of individually stored, overlapping swathes of pixels of an image of the object portion, the method comprising carrying out the following steps in a substantially continuous sequence: (a) receiving user input selecting a portion of the object and in response to the receiving user input performing the following steps: (b) determining ones of the swathes which contain pixels within the selected portion; (c) after the determining of the swathes at step (b), correlating adjacent ones of said determined swathes; (d) adjusting the relative positions of the correlated adjacent swathes in accordance with the results of the correlating step (c); (e) generating a digital representation of pixels of the selected portion from the correlated adjacent swathes; and (f) displaying an image of the selected portion using the digital representation generated in step (e); wherein the overlapping swathes of pixels are collected at a high resolution and stored prior to receiving, via user input, the selection of the portion of the object; wherein receiving user input selecting a portion of the object of step (a) comprises: producing a pre-scan of the object at a resolution lower than the high resolution, the lower resolution pre-scan being performed after collecting the overlapping swathes of pixels at high resolution; and wherein the correlating in step (c) is based on the high resolution data.