Liheng Bian

Content adaptive illumination for Fourier ptychography

Fourier ptychography (FP) is a recently reported technique, for large field-of-view and high-resolution imaging. Specifically, FP captures a set of low-resolution images, under angularly varying illuminations, and stitches them together in the Fourier domain. One of FPs main disadvantages is its long capturing process, due to the requisite large number of incident illumination angles. In this Letter, utilizing the sparsity of natural images in the Fourier domain, we propose a highly efficient method, termed adaptive Fourier ptychography (AFP), which applies content adaptive illumination for FP, to capture the most informative parts of the scenes spatial spectrum. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the reported framework, with both simulated and real experiments. Results show that the proposed AFP could shorten the acquisition time of conventional FP, by around 30%-60%.

Fourier ptychographic reconstruction using Wirtinger flow optimization

Recently Fourier Ptychography (FP) has attracted great attention, due to its marked effectiveness in leveraging snapshot numbers for spatial resolution in large field-of-view imaging. To acquire high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) images under angularly varying illuminations for subsequent reconstruction, FP requires long exposure time, which largely limits its practical applications. In this paper, based on the recently reported Wirtinger flow algorithm, we propose an iterative optimization framework incorporating phase retrieval and noise relaxation together, to realize FP reconstruction using low SNR images captured under short exposure time. Experiments on both synthetic and real captured data validate the effectiveness of the proposed reconstruction method. Specifically, the proposed technique could save ~ 80% exposure time to achieve similar retrieval accuracy compared to the conventional FP. Besides, we have released our source code for non-commercial use.

Multispectral imaging using a single bucket detector

Existing multispectral imagers mostly use available array sensors to separately measure 2D data slices in a 3D spatial-spectral data cube. Thus they suffer from low photon efficiency, limited spectrum range and high cost. To address these issues, we propose to conduct multispectral imaging using a single bucket detector, to take full advantage of its high sensitivity, wide spectrum range, low cost, small size and light weight. Technically, utilizing the detector’s fast response, a scene’s 3D spatial-spectral information is multiplexed into a dense 1D measurement sequence and then demultiplexed computationally under the single pixel imaging scheme. A proof-of-concept setup is built to capture multispectral data of 64 pixels × 64 pixels × 10 wavelength bands ranging from 450 nm to 650 nm, with the acquisition time being 1 minute. The imaging scheme holds great potentials for various low light and airborne applications, and can be easily manufactured as production-volume portable multispectral imagers.

Joint Non-Gaussian Denoising and Superresolving of Raw High Frame Rate Videos

High frame rate cameras capture sharp videos of highly dynamic scenes by trading off signal-noise-ratio and image resolution, so combinational super-resolving and denoising is crucial for enhancing high speed videos and extending their applications. The solution is nontrivial due to the fact that two deteriorations co-occur during capturing and noise is nonlinearly dependent on signal strength. To handle this problem, we propose conducting noise separation and super resolution under a unified optimization framework, which models both spatiotemporal priors of high quality videos and signal-dependent noise. Mathematically, we align the frames along temporal axis and pursue the solution under the following three criterion: 1) the sharp noise-free image stack is low rank with some missing pixels denoting occlusions; 2) the noise follows a given nonlinear noise model; and 3) the recovered sharp image can be reconstructed well with sparse coefficients and an over complete dictionary learned from high quality natural images. In computation aspects, we propose to obtain the final result by solving a convex optimization using the modern local linearization techniques. In the experiments, we validate the proposed approach in both synthetic and real captured data.High frame rate cameras capture sharp videos of highly dynamic scenes by trading off signal-noise-ratio and image resolution, so combinational super-resolving and denoising is crucial for enhancing high speed videos and extending their applications. The solution is nontrivial due to the fact that two deteriorations co-occur during capturing and noise is nonlinearly dependent on signal strength. To handle this problem, we propose conducting noise separation and super resolution under a unified optimization framework, which models both spatiotemporal priors of high quality videos and signal-dependent noise. Mathematically, we align the frames along temporal axis and pursue the solution under the following three criterion: 1) the sharp noise-free image stack is low rank with some missing pixels denoting occlusions; 2) the noise follows a given nonlinear noise model; and 3) the recovered sharp image can be reconstructed well with sparse coefficients and an over complete dictionary learned from high quality natural images. In computation aspects, we propose to obtain the final result by solving a convex optimization using the modern local linearization techniques. In the experiments, we validate the proposed approach in both synthetic and real captured data.

Fourier ptychographic reconstruction using Poisson maximum likelihood and truncated Wirtinger gradient

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a novel computational coherent imaging technique for high space-bandwidth product imaging. Mathematically, Fourier ptychographic (FP) reconstruction can be implemented as a phase retrieval optimization process, in which we only obtain low resolution intensity images corresponding to the sub-bands of the sample’s high resolution (HR) spatial spectrum, and aim to retrieve the complex HR spectrum. In real setups, the measurements always suffer from various degenerations such as Gaussian noise, Poisson noise, speckle noise and pupil location error, which would largely degrade the reconstruction. To efficiently address these degenerations, we propose a novel FP reconstruction method under a gradient descent optimization framework in this paper. The technique utilizes Poisson maximum likelihood for better signal modeling, and truncated Wirtinger gradient for effective error removal. Results on both simulated data and real data captured using our laser-illuminated FPM setup show that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms. Also, we have released our source code for non-commercial use.

Patch-primitive driven compressive ghost imaging

Ghost imaging has rapidly developed for about two decades and attracted wide attention from different research fields. However, the practical applications of ghost imaging are still largely limited, by its low reconstruction quality and large required measurements. Inspired by the fact that the natural image patches usually exhibit simple structures, and these structures share common primitives, we propose a patch-primitive driven reconstruction approach to raise the quality of ghost imaging. Specifically, we resort to a statistical learning strategy by representing each image patch with sparse coefficients upon an over-complete dictionary. The dictionary is composed of various primitives learned from a large number of image patches from a natural image database. By introducing a linear mapping between non-overlapping image patches and the whole image, we incorporate the above local prior into the convex optimization framework of compressive ghost imaging. Experiments demonstrate that our method could obtain better reconstruction from the same amount of measurements, and thus reduce the number of requisite measurements for achieving satisfying imaging quality.

Multiframe denoising of high-speed optical coherence tomography data using interframe and intraframe priors.

Abstract. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an important interferometric diagnostic technique, which provides cross-sectional views of biological tissues’ subsurface microstructures. However, the imaging quality of high-speed OCT is limited by the large speckle noise. To address this problem, we propose a multiframe algorithmic method to denoise OCT volume. Mathematically, we build an optimization model which forces the temporally registered frames to be low-rank and the gradient in each frame to be sparse, under the constraints from logarithmic image formation and nonuniform noise variance. In addition, a convex optimization algorithm based on the augmented Lagrangian method is derived to solve the above model. The results reveal that our approach outperforms the other methods in terms of both speckle noise suppression and crucial detail preservation.

Resolution doubling with a reduced number of image acquisitions.

Structured illumination technique enhances the lateral resolution by projecting non-uniform intensity patterns on a sample. In a typical implementation, three lateral phase shifts (0, 2π/3, 4π/3) are needed for each orientation of the sinusoidal pattern, and 3 different orientations are needed to double the bandwidth isotopically in the Fourier domain. To this end, 9 incoherent images are needed in the acquisition process. In this paper, we discuss an imaging strategy for the structured illumination technique and demonstrate the use of a modified incoherent Fourier ptychographic procedure for reducing the number of acquisitions. In the first implementation, we used complementary sinusoidal patterns for sample illumination. We show that, the number of lateral phase shifts can be reduced from 3 to 2 for each orientation of the sinusoidal pattern and the total number of image acquisitions can be reduced to 6 with 3 orientations. In the second implementation, we further reduce the number of image acquisitions to 4. We also show that, the resolution-doubled image can be recovered even with unknown phases of the sinusoidal patterns. We validate the proposed imaging procedure with non-fluorescence samples. The reported approach may shorten the acquisition time of super-resolution imaging and reduce phototoxicity of biological samples.

A self-synchronized high speed computational ghost imaging system: A leap towards dynamic capturing

Computational ghost imaging needs to acquire a large number of correlated measurements between reference patterns and the scene for reconstruction, so extremely high acquisition speed is crucial for fast ghost imaging. With the development of technologies, high frequency illumination and detectors are both available, but their synchronization needs technique demanding customization and lacks flexibility for different setup configurations. This letter proposes a self-synchronization scheme that can eliminate this difficulty by introducing a high precision synchronization technique and corresponding algorithm. We physically implement the proposed scheme using a 20kHz spatial light modulator to generate random binary patterns together with a 100 times faster photodiode for high speed ghost imaging, and the acquisition frequency is around 14 times faster than that of state-of-the-arts. c

Bispectral coding: compressive and high-quality acquisition of fluorescence and reflectance

Fluorescence widely coexists with reflectance in the real world, and an accurate representation of these two components in a scene is vitally important. Despite the rich knowledge of fluorescence mechanisms and behaviors, traditional fluorescence imaging approaches are quite limited in efficiency and quality. To address these two shortcomings, we propose a bispectral coding scheme to capture fluorescence and reflectance: multiplexing code is applied to excitation spectrums to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, and compressive sampling code is applied to emission spectrums for high efficiency. For computational reconstruction from the sparse coded measurements, the redundancy in both components promises recovery from sparse measurements, and the difference between their redundancies promises accurate separation. Mathematically, we cast the reconstruction as a joint optimization, whose solution can be derived by the Augmented Lagrange Method. In our experiment, results on both synthetic data and real data captured by our prototype validate the proposed approach, and we also demonstrate its advantages in two computer vision tasks--photorealistic relighting and segmentation.