Photographic-quality Imaging with DigitalMontage®

By controlling the microscope stage or imaging optics DigitalMontage® enables an array of images to be acquired and stitched seamlessly together. The resulting montage shows specimen structure at a resolution that would be impossible to collect even with cameras possessing tens of times more pixels! 

The DigitalMontage® palette enables you to acquire, stitch or acquire and stitch your array of images.

Acquisition

To offset the field of view of the camera DigitalMontage® can use either the microscope stage or the image-shift deflectors. At high magnifications it may be easier to stitch the images together if the image-shift deflectors are used to offset the field of view. At low magnifications the stage enables a larger area of the specimen to be covered and minimises the effecs of any optical distortion present in the system.

When you set up an acquisition you choose the number of images in x and y, the overlap between them, and whether to use the stage or the image-shift deflectors to change the field of view.

Stitching

When stitching the images together DigitalMontage® automatically adjusts the intensities of the images so as to minimize or eliminate the presence of seams in the result. If you should encounter a case which is difficult to automatically stitch you can choose to refine the positions of the images after the automatic determination, or to completely manually position them. The software will then stitch the images together and adjust the intensities as in the fully automatic case.

An example of a 4x4 montage with the images laid out as  acquired on the left and stitched together on the right. The original images were 2k x 2k. The montage is about 7k x 7k.

Building upon experience gained from the past this version of DigitalMontage® has been completely re-written and integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Gatan Microscopy Suite® (GMS).

Product Requirements

In order to use DigitalMontage® you must already have a Gatan CCD camera installed on your microscope. Most modern microscopes are supported in addition to some older ones. Please contact Gatan to determine compatibility with a particular microscope model.