Montage

See also Stitching for details on stitching montage images.

Montage

A Montage acquires images that overlap slightly, which are then stitched together into a larger image. This can be useful for capturing high resolution images of samples that are larger than the field of view.

There are two ways to define a Montage - Tiles and Perimeter.

Defining by Tiles

In this mode, the size of the montage is defined by the number of fields. A field corresponds to the size of the image seen by the camera and magnification being used.

Width/Height - Define the size of the montage as the number of overlapping fields.

Overlap - Define the percentage of overlap between two adjacent fields.

Note:  If you have bounds set, your montage will automatically adjust Width and Height to fit within the bounds. 

Defining by Perimeter

In this mode, the size of the montage is defined by adding two or more fields to the list, similar to the operation of Multi-Position.

Fusion will automatically calculate the number of tiles required to capture all defined fields.

Navigate using the hardware or software joystick to the edge of the sample and click the + button, shown below, to add two or more fields.

Using Set Bounds in defining a montage

See Specimen Navigation for more detail on setting bounds.

Once your bounded area is set, it is possible to use this as a defined region in which to create a high-quality tiled and stitched image.  If you open the protocol tab (1), select Montage (2), select Perimeter (3) you can then import (4) the bounded region to define your montage region.

Note - the image axes in Fusion and Imaris originate from the lower left corner. As a result, when opened in other software, the montage order may be different to that shown here. See also Image Toolsfor a description of this.

Images acquired using Montage can be stitched after acquisition. See Andor Stitcher

Alternatively, stitching can also be done in a variety of 3rd party software - for example, Terastitcher, XUVTools and FIJI's Grid/Collection stitching plugin. Please refer to those software packages for instructions on how to combine the images into a complete montage.

A video guide can be seen here: Image acquisition: Acquire a Montage (set tiles) / Image acquisition: Acquire a Montage (set perimeter)