No abstract

SummaryDigital holographic microscope allows imaging of opaque and transparent specimens without staining. A digitally recorded hologram must be reconstructed numerically at the actual depth of the object to obtain a focused image. We have developed a high-resolution digital holographic microscope for imaging amplitude and phase objects with autofocusing capability. If the actual depth of an object is not known a priori, it is estimated by comparing the sharpness of several reconstructions at different distances, which is very demanding in means of computational power when the recorded hologram is large. In this paper, we present 11 different sharpness metrics for estimating the actual focus depths of objects. The speed performance of focusing is discussed, and a scaling technique is introduced where the speed of autofocusing increases on the order of square of the scale ratio. We measured the performance of scaling on computer-generated holograms and on recorded holograms of a biological sample. We show that simulations are in good agreement with the experimental results.

Here we show the capability of copper oxide (CuO) nanoparticles formed on copper (Cu) electrodes by the electrolysis as a real time active substrate for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). We have experimentally found that using just the ultra pure water as the electrolyte and the Cu electrodes, ions are extracted from the copper anode form copper oxide nanoparticles on the anode surface in matter of minutes. Average particle size on the anode reaches to 100 nm in ninety seconds and grows to about 300 nm in five minutes. This anode is used in Raman experiments in real time as the nanoparticles were forming and the maximum enhancement factor (EF) of Raman signals were over five orders of magnitude. Other metal electrodes made of brass, zinc (Zn), silver (Ag) and aluminum (Al) were also tried for the anode material for a possible real-time substrate for SERS applications. Experimentally obtained enhancement factors were above five orders of magnitude for brass electrodes like the copper but for the other metals no enhancement is observed. Electron microscope images show the cubic nanoparticle formation on copper and brass electrodes but none in the other metals studied.

Here, a new method for calculating the computer-generated holograms of three-dimensional (3D) objects is presented along with a review of current techniques. The method, the planar layers method (PLM), is established on the idea of representing 3D objects in discrete planar layers perpendicular to the observation plane, then calculating the total far field pattern by summing up the far field patterns of each layer. Simulation results, computational complexity, and error comparisons reveal that this new method can be used to calculate far field patterns--hence, the holograms--of computer-synthesized objects very efficiently.

The most significant advantage of holographic imaging is that one does not need to do focusing alignment for the scene or objects while capturing their images. To focus on a particular object recorded in a digital hologram, a post-processing on the recorded image must be performed. This post-processing, so called the reconstruction, is essentially the calculation of wave propagation in free space. If the object's optical distance to the recording plane is not known a priori, focusing methods are used to estimate this distance. However, these operations can be quite time consuming as the hologram sizes increase. When there is a time constraint on these procedures and the image resolution is high, traditional central processing units (CPUs) can no longer satisfy the desired reconstruction speeds. Then, especially for real-time operations, additional hardware accelerators are required for reconstructing high resolution holograms. To this extend, today's commercial graphic cards offer a viable solution, as the holograms can be reconstructed tens of times faster with a graphics processing unit than with the state-of-the-art CPUs. Here we present an auto-focusing megapixel-resolution digital holographic microscope (DHM) that uses a graphics processing unit (GPU) as the calculation engine. The computational power of the GPU allows the DHM to work in real-time such that the reconstruction distance is estimated unsupervised, and the post-processing of the holograms are made completely transparent to the user. We compare DHM with GPU and CPU and present experimental results showing a maximum of 70 focused reconstructions per second (frps) with 1024 × 1024 pixel holograms.

Abstract-A high resolution ultra wideband radar prototype is developed for through the wall imaging. The frequency range of operation of the radar is selected to be 1.85 to 6 GHz in order to have high spatial resolution. Besides the hardware, we have also developed a custom image processing software which attacks the problem of false target recognition and rejection. In this paper, we present our prototype along with various experimental results such as detecting stationary targets and detecting respiratory activity of a human behind a 23 cm thick brick wall.

Channeling radiation is a source of intense, tunable, quasimonochromatic x rays produced by electrons traveling along a direction of symmetry through a crystal. We analyze the effect of the channeling source crystal, through both its composition and lattice structure, on the number of photons emitted per electron, the linewidths of the radiation, and the maximum sustainable currents to identify the crystal which will yield the most photons in a bandwidth of less than 10% full width at half maximum (FWHM). Although high atomic number (Z) crystals produce a greater number of photons per electron, given their poor thermal properties these crystals cannot sustain as high average currents as lower Z crystals. The linewidths of the channeling radiation emitted from high Z crystals are as large as 50% FWHM, and electrons are dechanneled more quickly in these crystals, limiting their use as a quasimonochromatic x-ray source. Given its exceptional thermal conductivity and narrow linewidths, diamond is the optimal source crystal for the production of intense, quasimonochromatic x rays using channeling radiation.

No abstract