Generalized Pareto Distributions—Application to Autofocus in Automated Microscopy

Dihedral filters correspond to the Fourier transform of functions defined on square grids. For gray value images there are six pairs of dihedral edge-detector pairs on 5 ×5 windows. In low-level image statistics the Weibull- or the generalized extreme value distributions are often used as statistical distributions modeling such filter results. Since only points with high filter magnitudes are of interest we argue that the generalized Pareto distribution is a better choice. Practically this also leads to more efficient algorithms since only a fraction of the raw filter results have to be analyzed. The generalized Pareto distributions with a fixed threshold form a Riemann manifold with the Fisher information matrix as a metric tensor. For the generalized Pareto distributions we compute the determinant of the inverse Fisher information matrix as a function of the shape and scale parameters and show that it is the product of a polynomial in the shape parameter and the squared scale parameter. We then show that this determinant defines a sharpness function that can be used in autofocus algorithms. We evaluate the properties of this sharpness function with the help of a benchmark database of microscopy images with known ground truth focus positions. We show that the method based on this sharpness function results in a focus estimation that is within the given ground truth interval for a vast majority of focal sequences. Cases where it fails are mainly sequences with very poor image quality and sequences with sharp structures in different layers. The analytical structure given by the Riemann geometry of the space of probability density functions can be used to construct more efficient autofocus methods than other methods based on empirical moments.