Quantitative analysis of errors caused by vibration on polarization parametric indirect microscopic imaging system.

Abstract

Vibrations cause many problems such as displacement, distortion, and defocusing in microscopic imaging systems. Because vibration errors are random in direction, amplitude, and frequency, it is not known which aspect of the image quality will be affected by these problems and to what extent. Polarization parametric indirect microscopic imaging (PIMI) is a technique that records polarization parameters in a conventional wide-field reflection microscope using polarization modulation of the illumination beam and additional data analysis of the raw images. This indirect imaging technique allows the spatial resolution of the system to be improved. Here, the influence of vibration on the image sharpness and spatial resolution of a PIMI system is analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Degradation in the sharpness of PIMI images is quantified by means of the modulation transfer function and deterioration in the effective spatial resolution by the Fourier ring correlation. These results show that the quality of PIMI images can be improved significantly using vibration isolation.