A digital image processing-based system and method for quantitatively processing a plurality of nucleic acid species expressed in a microarray are disclosed. The microarray is a grid of a plurality of sub-grids of the nucleic acid species. The system includes a scanner that has a digital scanning sensor that scans the microarray and transmits from an output a digital image of the microarray, and a computer that receives the digital image of the microarray from the scanner and then processes the digital image, identifying each of the microarray's sub-grids. The computer identifies the position of each of the sub-grids by (a) identifying regions in the digital image that each contains one of the sub-grids, (b) identifying rows and columns in each region where nucleic acid species are expressed to form a set of candidate sub-grids in each region, (c) selecting for each region a probable sub-grid from the set of candidate sub-grids in each region, and (d) comparing the positions of the probable sub-grids from each region to finalize the sub-grid positions.