Concepts in imaging and microscopy: Color image processing for microscopy

Digital image analysis has long been applied to monochrome images from the light microscope. Using these techniques one can locate, measure, identify, and count the objects of interest in a microscope field of view. Since microscope images often contain color information of interest, it is now becoming more common to analyze the spectral content of images as well. Although most of the digital imaging techniques developed for monochrome microscopy work well with color images, there are a few considerations specific to the analysis of multispectral imagery. These include obtaining a properly balanced multicolor digital image, specifying the color components of the image, and compensating for imperfect separation among the color channels.