MULTI-CHANNEL EXTENDED DEPTH-OF-FIELD METHOD FOR AUTOMATED DIGITAL CYTOLOGY

The present invention relates to a method (M) for generating a color-faithful EDF, i.e. extended depth-of-field, image from a color volume (1), wherein the voxels for a fixed index going from 1 to L are 2D images acquired at different focal depths in a z-direction using a microscope, said method comprising the steps of: generating a grayscale volume (2); applying (M10) an invertible color-to-grayscale transformation to said volume (1); applying (M20) a wavelet transform to the grayscale volume (2) to obtain a 3D wavelet coefficient matrix (3); selecting wavelet coefficients using a predefined coefficient selection rule; generating (M40) a 2D wavelet coefficient matrix WCM and a 2D coefficient map CM; applying (M50) an inverse transformation of the wavelet transform to the 2D wavelet coefficient matrix WCM so as to obtain a 2D grayscale EDF image (4); generating a 2D color composite image CC; applying (M70) an inverse transformation of the color-to-grayscale transformation to the 2D grayscale EDF image (4) to obtain a 2D color EDF image (5); converting (M80) the 2D color composite image CC and the 2D color EDF image (5) into a color space comprising at least one chromaticity component and at least one intensity component; and concatenating (M90), the at least one chromaticity component of the 2D color composite image CC and the at least one intensity component of the 2D color EDF image (5), to obtain a color-faithful extended depth-of-field image.