Abstract: A way to design a codebook for estimating the type of a molecule at a particular location in a fluorescence microscopy image makes use of one or both of (1) knowledge of the non-uniform prior distribution of molecule types (i.e., some types are known a priori to occur more frequently than others) and/or knowledge of co-occurrence of molecule types at close locations (e.g., in a same cell); and (2) knowledge of a model of the (e.g., random) process that yields the intensities that are expected at a location when a molecule with a particular subset of markers (i.e., a molecule of a type that has been assigned a codeword that defines that subset) is present at that location. The codebook design may provide experimental efficiency by reducing the number of images that need to be acquired and/or improve classification or detection accuracy by making the codewords for different molecule types more distinctive.