Stitching

Stitching is the process of combining multiple acquisition tiles (FOVsLoading...) into a single composite image. The simplest case is encoded stitching: the microscope stage records its position for each tile, and the stitcher places each tile at its recorded position. When stage encoders are accurate, this works directly. Non-encoded (or content-based) stitching computes overlap correlations between adjacent tiles and aligns them by image content — useful when stage positions aren't recorded or aren't accurate enough. Z-position stitching handles the additional axis: tiles acquired at different focal depths are aligned in z before lateral combination, producing a focus-corrected mosaic. Correlative stitching aligns tiles from different acquisitions of the same field — for instance, fluorescence and brightfield of the same slide, or images from two different instruments — letting downstream analysis use information from both.