Adaptive system correction for robust Fourier ptychographic imaging

Fourier ptychography (FP) is a recently developed imaging approach that bypasses the resolution limit defined by the lens' aperture. In current FP imaging platforms, systematic noise sources come from the intensity fluctuation of multiple LED elements and the pupil aberrations of the employed optics. These system uncertainties can significantly degrade the reconstruction quality and limit the achievable resolution, imposing a restriction on the effectiveness of the FP approach. In this paper, we report an optimization procedure that performs adaptive system correction for Fourier ptychographic imaging. Similar to the techniques used in phase retrieval, the reported procedure involves the evaluation of an image-quality metric at each iteration step, followed by the estimation of an improved system correction. This optimization process is repeated until the image-quality metric is maximized. As a demonstration, we used this process to correct for illumination intensity fluctuation, to compensate for pupil aberration of the optics, and to recover several unknown system parameters. The reported adaptive correction scheme may improve the robustness of Fourier ptychographic imaging by factoring out system imperfections and uncertainties. (C) Optical Society of America 2013