Characterization of shift-variant pupil aberrations for wide field-of-view microscopy

TL;DR

This paper presents a robust method for characterizing and compensating for shift-variant pupil aberrations in wide field-of-view microscopy, enabling improved image quality across large imaging areas.

Contribution

The authors develop a simple approach to measure and correct shift-variant aberrations using intensity images and a GPS algorithm, advancing wide field-of-view microscopy.

Findings

Accurate 2D aberration maps over the entire field-of-view.

Effective shift-variant aberration compensation via deconvolution.

Automated characterization method suitable for gigapixel imaging.

Abstract

We describe a simple and robust approach for characterizing the shift-variant pupil aberrations of wide field-of-view microscopy systems. We derive the location-dependent pupil transfer functions by first capturing multiple intensity images at different defocus settings; a generalized pattern search (GPS) algorithm is then applied to recover the complex pupil functions at ~350 different spatial locations over the entire field-of-view. Parameter fitting transforms these pupil functions into accurate 2D aberration maps. We demonstrate shift-variant aberration compensation by using an information-preserving image deconvolution scheme over the entire field-of-view. Such automated shift-variant pupil characterization will facilitate new approaches of aberration correction for future gigapixel imaging platforms.