^™Huygens Stitcher

High-quality stitching without artefacts for all microscopy data types

Huygens Stitcher supports tile image data from any microscope type and can directly read associated metadata, which often includes tile position information—eliminating the need for file conversion. Its unique XYZ tile positioning method ensures high 3D precision, even with 0% acquisition overlap between tiles. Tiles can be seamlessly stitched in the X, Y, and Z directions. The user-friendly Wizard combines fast, GPU-accelerated tile fitting, vignetting correction, and optional deconvolution, enabling efficient and high-quality results. Huygens Stitcher handles datasets of hundreds of gigabytes with ease (see testimonials below). It is also available as a task within the Workflow Processor, allowing integration with other image processing steps in one single pipeline. Final results can be saved in (open-source) formats that also preserve the original image metadata.

No file conversion and overlap between tiles is required

Advanced algorithms prevent artefacts

Improved stitching due to integrated deconvolution

Image description Dendritic spines are visible even in a large field of view. Confocal image tiles of a brain section were stitched, automatically vignetting-corrected and deconvolved with Huygens Stitcher. Courtesy of Dr. Moritz Kirschmann, University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Testimonials

Features

• Easy to use and stable Wizard for obtaining unmatched stitching results.
• Interactive mosaic preview of the tile content.
• Optimal 3D positioning of each tile guarantees smooth transitions across regions of overlap in X, Y and Z.
• Tiles with 0% overlap can still be stitched.
• Support for 2D, 3D, multichannel, and time series images.
• No limit to the number of tiles that can be stitched.
• No limit to the total file size of the input sequence.
• Multiple scenes with tiles can be stitched all at once.
• Automatic vignetting estimation and correction option for each channel.
• Manual vignetting and shading correction option with a recorded flat-field and dark frame.
• Optional high quality Huygens deconvolution integrated in workflow.
• Choice for only stitching and optional vignetting also possible by simply skipping deconvolution in this wizard.
• Registration and deconvolution is supported by GPU.
• Stitches all file types supported in Huygens (some my require a XML file with layout/location information).
• Reads layout information from Abberior STEDYCON (OBF), DeltaVision, LIF, CZI, ND2(Windows) formats automatically.
• Support for custom stitching patterns.
• Settings can be saved to a template for repetitive use and for batch stitching in the Workflow Processor.
• "Memory Mapped File" with extension (.mmf) for processing images that do not fit in RAM memory.
• Since Huygens 24.10: Low-memory" option for X,Y,Z optimization that drastically reduces memory requirements

Huygens Stitcher Gallery

No Vignetting Correction

Auto Vignetting correction

Huygens stitched tiles of widefield (Leica) fluorescent Leica LIF data. The same data is shown with and without Huygens automatic vignetting and shading correction. Image represents a developing mouse cortex (P30) stained for Tbr1 and reelin.

inset: Huygens Deconvolved

inset: RAW confocal

Impressive large FOV (22477 x 19936 pixels) dual-channel confocal dataset, imaged with the Abberior Instruments STEDYCON. The dataset was acquired by imaging 3090 individual tiles. All tiles were stitched using the Huygens Stitcher wizard, resulting in a field of view of approx 2 x 2 millimeter with 100nm pixel sampling. Inset shows a zoomed-in region of single cell to appreciate the level of detail in the full dataset.