Improving spatial resolution of the light field microscope with Fourier ptychography

Light field microscope (LFM) is an optical microscope capable of obtaining images having large depth of field with different viewpoints. By using the parallax of these multi-view images, it is possible to reconstruct the 3D sample. However, the sampling interval of this multi-viewpoint image depends on the pitch interval of the microlens array, so the spatial resolution is low, and the accuracy of the 3D sample to be reconstructed is also low. Conventional research has a method of increasing the spatial resolution by subpixel-shifted multiple images. However, this method has problems such as the necessity of mechanical operation and high cost. Therefore, we propose applying Fourier ptychography to the LFM. Fourier ptychography is a technique to obtain high spatial resolution images by joining images obtained by irradiating samples from different angles using LED arrays in Fourier space. Fourier ptychography does not require mechanical scanning and is high throughput and low cost. In addition, Fourier ptycoography is possible to obtain phase information on a sample, and it is also possible to obtain a fine 3D sample. We propose a method to generate high spatial resolution multiview images using Fourier ptychography and reconstruct highly accurate 3D sample from those images. In this research, we experiment with the original LFM and verify the effect.