Hybrid image stabilization for in vivo microscopic imaging

This paper proposes hybrid image stabilization for in vivo microscopy. In vivo microscopy, which deals with living tissues in a living subject, has been becoming more and more important because it will reveal lots of unknown biological mysteries. One of the fundamental difficulties in in vivo microscopy is that the observing images from the microscope are so unstable due to the subjectpsilas trembling, causing the observation difficulty. This trembling motion comes from the biological motion such as breathing, heartbeat, and so on. We propose hybrid image stabilization as a solution for getting stabilized images with respect to a vibrating subject. The hybrid image stabilization utilizes both hardware stabilization method and software stabilization method. In our hybrid system design, hardware stabilization gets rid of big motion by lens tracking and software stabilization further removes the remaining small motion through a realtime image processing on the image plane. We verify the effectiveness of our approach by showing experimental results with our hybrid image stabilization system.