Composable Scientific Image Processing
Enhance SEM texture, extract ridges and edges, map grayscale response into colour, and arrange every operation as an editable algorithm layer.
Available — v2.0MolFocus ROI combines continuous-tone texture enhancement, edge and ridge analysis, visualisation, and optional ROI measurement in one desktop workspace.
Single-channel and three-equal-channel SEM exports are recognised without reducing continuous grayscale data to black and white.
Add atomic operations one step at a time. Update, disable, reorder, or delete a layer and the downstream result is recomputed.
Wavelet denoising, local entropy, shape index, Hessian ridge and Gabor filters reveal subtle helical surface structure.
Use Turbo, Viridis, Plasma or Jet to separate nearby grayscale responses visually. Gamma can reshape the mapping before colour is applied.
Canny, Sobel, Scharr, Laplacian and morphological gradients can feed the Straight-Line Hough transform.
Open modeless Split View or the on-demand 3D intensity-height surface from the Analysis menu while continuing to adjust the workflow.
There are no forced presets. Each method can run alone or become one stage in a reproducible processing chain.
Choose from one flat method list. Binary segmentation is optional; continuous texture and visualisation results are not forced into area statistics.
A practical four-step workflow for faint helical-fibre surface patterns.
Load PNG, JPEG, TIFF or BMP files, then crop the region of interest. Cropping preserves the raw grayscale transition and does not automatically threshold the image.
Try Wavelet Denoising or Bilateral Filter first. Enter exact parameter values and use the ? buttons to understand their effect.
Add Local Entropy, Shape Index, Gabor or Ridge Filter as new layers. Tune the scale to the expected ridge width or pitch instead of binarising the signal.
Use Gamma and False Colour for visual separation, compare against the source in Split View, inspect the intensity surface in 3D, then save the image or reuse the layer chain in batch processing.
Texture enhancement does not require binary-area analysis. Measurement tools remain available as an independent part of the application.
Flood Fill, Watershed, GrabCut, Adaptive Threshold and Edge Follow help select regions, with manual polygon annotation available alongside them.
Use the ruler to convert pixel measurements into physical units before reporting lengths or areas.
Binary outputs can produce black/white ratios and connected-feature size distributions. Continuous outputs remain display-only.
Save the explicit layer sequence and its parameters, then apply the same reproducible workflow across a folder.
"Built by a researcher who spends hours staring at SEM images. Every feature in this tool comes from real lab experience — things I wished existed when I was doing my PhD."
— Wang Tao, ICCAS
Free for non-commercial research and education.
Desktop application for scientific image workflows.
If this software contributes to your published work, please cite:
Wang Tao. (2026). MolFocus ROI: Advanced Image Analysis Tool. Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS). Available at: https://molfocus.com