Extracting Super-resolution Structures inside a Single Molecule or Overlapped Molecules from One Blurred Image

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that under certain conditions, full information of super-resolution structures inside single or overlapped molecules can be recovered from a single blurred image, challenging conventional diffraction limits.

Contribution

It introduces a novel condition under which diffraction-blurred images retain all information, enabling unlimited resolution recovery through solving equations in spatial or frequency domains.

Findings

Full information can be recovered from blurred images under specific conditions.

The proposed method achieves theoretically unlimited resolution.

The method is effective in simulations and tolerant to some noise.

Abstract

In some super-resolution techniques, adjacent points are illuminated at different times. Thereby, their locations and light intensities can be detected even if the images are very blurred due to diffraction. According to conventional theories, the points' inner details cannot be recovered because the images' high frequency components are removed due to the diffraction-limit. But this study finds an exception, and full information can be extracted from a diffraction-blurred image. In such a "resolvable condition", neither profile nor detail information is damaged by diffraction. Thereby, it can be recovered reversibly by solving equation systems in spatial domain or frequency domain. This condition is tightly relevant to the imaging condition of existing super-resolution techniques. Based on the condition, a method is proposed which can achieve unlimited high resolutions in principle, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments. It can also work without any observed image outside the region of interest. Simulation experiments also show its tolerance to certain level of noise.