Automatic phase aberration compensation for digital holographic microscopy based on phase variation minimization

We propose a numerical and totally automatic phase aberration compensation method in digital holographic microscopy. The phase aberrations are extracted in a nonlinear optimization procedure in which the phase variation of the reconstructed object wave is minimized. Not only phase curvature but also high-order aberrations could be corrected without extra devices. The correction is directly carried out with the wrapped phase map, which is not affected by phase unwrapping or fitting errors. Numerical simulation proves that the proposed method is more accurate than the conventional surface fitting method without selecting a cell-free background. Experimental results demonstrate the availability of the proposed method in real-time analysis of living cells. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America