What does the number 50micro m on the bottom right of the attached image mean?

Hello,

I was wondering what exactly the number on the bottom right of this image mean and how could I change it to 25 or 100 for instance?

Thank you.

Answer 1

[David Young]

It's a scale bar. It means that the distance between its ends in the image corresponds to a distance of (that is, 0.05 mm) in the real world. An object long in the scene would have the same length as the scale bar in the image.

How you can change it depends on how it was generated. Was the image made with MATLAB? If so, please give details of the code that was used.

[Penny13]

Thanks for your answer. No, it is not generated with MATLAB. Does deleting every other pixel in the image relates somehow relates to changing that number?

[David Young]

No, deleting every other pixel will change the size of both the objects in the image and the scale bar by the same amount, so the scale bar will still be correct as long as the number is not changed.

[Guillaume]

No, it is not generated with MATLAB

Note that this is a matlab forum. We expect questions about matlab. As far as I can tell your question has nothing to do with matlab.

[Penny13]

@Guillamue,

The image has not been generated with MATLAB and is a histology image but I am working on that with MATLAB and in MATLAB environment.

[Penny13]

David, just one more question, is there a way that I could change the scale to half of that number but I could retain the size to the original size or it will change image content?

Thank you

[David Young]

Sorry Penny but I don't really understand that question. You can certainly change the size of the image using, for example imresize, and the scale bar will still be correct because it will change with the rest of the image.

If what you want to is make the scale bar bigger or smaller relative to the image (e.g. you want to make it 25 or 100 microns long), then the best way to do that would be to go back to whatever originally made the image and created the scale bar. If you can't do that, you could use MATLAB to do change the scale bar - it would involve detecting and removing the old scale bar, perhaps using imfill, and then drawing a new scale bar at the size required, perhaps using insertText for the number (assuming you have the Image Processing toolbox and the Computer Vision System toolbox.

[Penny13]

Thank you David! you answered my question.