Patent ID: 8890947

Claim:
A microscope image acquisition apparatus comprising: a macro-image acquisition section that acquires a macro image of a glass slide having a specimen mounted thereon; an extraction section that extracts the image of the specimen acquired by the macro-image acquisition section; a block setting section that sets a respective block for each one of a plurality of non-contiguous specimen elements (lumps) in the extracted specimen image when the specimen extracted by the extraction section is scattered to form said plurality of non-contiguous specimen elements (lumps); an area dividing section that for each of the blocks set by the block setting section, divides said block into a plurality of small regions; and a micro-image acquisition section that searches for an autofocusing in-focus position in each of the blocks set by the block setting section, performs an automatic focusing operation for the specimen in each of the small regions in a block where the in-focus position has been found, and acquires, for each of the small regions generated by the area dividing section, a micro image having a higher resolution than the macro image.