Synthetic aperture microscopy for high resolution imaging through a turbid medium

Abstract

We report on synthetic aperture microscopy through a highly turbid medium. We first recorded a transmission matrix for the turbid medium with an angular basis of 20,000 complex images covering 0.6 NA. This effectively converts the medium into a lens of the same NA. Distorted images of a target object are then taken at 500 different angles of illumination covering 0.6 NA. For each of the distorted images, the original object image is reconstructed from the transmission matrix by the recently developed turbid lens imaging (TLI) technique. All 500 reconstructed images are synthesized to enhance the NA to 1.2 and thereby generate an object image with twice the enhanced spatial resolution of the individual images. Our method of applying aperture synthesis for TLI makes it possible to enhance the resolving power without increasing the number of transmission matrix elements. This relieves the demand for data acquisition and processing that has impeded the practicality of TLI. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America