Image sharpness metrics for digital microscopy

Image sharpness measurements are important parts of many image processing applications. To measure image sharpness multiple algorithms have been proposed and measured in the past but they have been developed with having out-of-focus photographs in mind and they do not work so well with images taken using a digital microscope. In this article we show the difference between images taken with digital cameras, images taken with a digital microscope and artificially blurred images. The conventional sharpness measures are executed on all these categories to measure the difference and a standard image set taken with a digital microscope is proposed and described to serve as a common baseline for further sharpness measures in the field.