METHOD FOR AUTOMATICALLY IDENTIFYING MICRORREDE CHIP SONGS AND PROBES IN A SCANED MICRORREDE IMAGE OF HIGH DENSITY AND HIGH RESOLUTION

摘要

A method of automatically identifying the microarray chip corners and probes, even if there are no probes at the corners, in a high density and high resolution microarray 5 scanned image having an image space, wherein the method minimizes the error distortions in the image arising in the scanning process by applying to the image a multipass corner finding algorithm comprising: (a) applying a Radon transform to an input microarray image to project the image into an angle and distance space where it is possible to find the orientation of the straight lines; (b) applying a fast Fourier transform to the projected image 10 of (a) to find the optimal tilting angle of the projected image; (c) determining the optimal first and last local maxima for the optimal tilting angle; (d) back projecting the determined first and last local maxima to the image space to find the first approximation of the first and last column lines of the image; (e) rotating the image and repeating steps (a) through (d) to find the first approximation of the top and bottom row lines of the image; (f) determining 15 the first approximation of the four corners of the image from the intersection of the column and row lines; (g) applying a heuristic for determining if the first approximation of step (f) is sufficient; and (h) optionally trimming the scanned image around the first approximation of the four corners and repeating steps (a) through (f).