The current invention discloses a novel spectral transformation technique for characterizing digitized intensity output patterns from microarrays. This method yields improved sensitivity with reduced false positives and false negatives. Current microarray methods are overly sensitive to the detection of a visible distinction between pixels associated with probes and pixels associated with background. In one embodiment, a technique is disclosed that comprises the steps of: extracting pixels associated with an object of interest and transforming such pixels from an intensity representation to a spectral representation. In some embodiments, the extraction is based on a tessellated logarithmic spiral extraction that may yield a pixel core with a sampling of both foreground and background pixels. This core may then be computationally rescaled by 10.times.-10,000.times. to enhance spatial resolution. Once the extracted pixels are represented in the spectral regime, convolution with resolution-enhancement kernels may be used to accentuate morphological features capturing platform specific phenomenology.