Wave optics theory and 3-D deconvolution for the light field microscope

Abstract

Abstract:Light field microscopy is a new technique for high-speed volumetric imaging of weakly scattering or fluorescent specimens. It employs an array of microlenses to trade off spatial resolution against angular resolution, thereby allowing a 4-D light field to be captured using a single photographic exposure without the need for scanning. The recorded light field can then be used to computationally reconstruct a full volume. In this paper, we present an optical model for light field microscopy based on wave optics, instead of previously reported ray optics models. We also present a 3-D deconvolution method for light field microscopy that is able to reconstruct volumes at higher spatial resolution, and with better optical sectioning, than previously reported. To accomplish this, we take advantage of the dense spatio-angular sampling provided by a microlens array at axial positions away from the native object plane. This dense sampling permits us to decode aliasing present in the light field to reconstruct high-frequency information. We formulate our method as an inverse problem for reconstructing the 3-D volume, which we solve using a GPU-accelerated iterative algorithm. Theoretical limits on the depth-dependent lateral resolution of the reconstructed volumes are derived. We show that these limits are in good agreement with experimental results on a standard USAF 1951 resolution target. Finally, we present 3-D reconstructions of pollen grains that demonstrate the improvements in fidelity made possible by our method.

Correlation Plenoptic Imaging With Entangled Photons

“…As plenoptic imaging is being broadly adopted in diverse fields such as digital photography [6][7][8], microscopy [3,4], 3D imaging, sensing and rendering [2], our proposed scheme has direct applications in several biomedical and engineering fields. Interestingly, the coherent nature of the correlation plenoptic imaging technique may lead to innovative coherent microscopy modality.…”

“…On one hand, such images correspond to the required viewpoints enabling the three-dimensional reconstruction of the scene. In fact, plenoptic imaging is the simplest method of 3D imaging with the present technological means [2][3][4]. On the other hand, the available angular information also enables the simplification of low-light shooting: The acquired images can be combined, in post-processing, to give an overall image characterized by the same depth of field of the N original images, but a signal-to-noise ratio N times larger [5].…”

Computational methods in super-resolution microscopy

“…The maximum likelihood estimation method, for example, uses the image that has the maximum likelihood of estimating the original object. A log-likelihood function is calculated and optimized with iteration (Broxton et al, 2013). Sometimes a penalty function can be added to ensure its convergence.…”

Spatial Information in Large-Scale Neural Recordings

“…3 There exists a family of deconvolution techniques that estimate the PSF and use it to obtain a more accurate representation of the original signal (e.g., Colak et al, 1997;Onodera et al, 1998;Yan and Zeng, 2008;Broxton et al, 2013). In theory, with sufficient samples and knowledge of the PSF, one could obtain a perfect representation of a sparse signal in the absence of noise.…”