Automatic aberration compensation for digital holographic microscopy based on bicubic downsampling and improved minimization of global phase gradients

Abstract

In digital holographic microscopy, aberrations caused by imperfect optical system settings can greatly affect the quantitative measurement of the target phase, so the compensation of aberrations in the distorted phase has become a key point of research in digital holographic microscopy. Here, we propose a fully automatic numerical phase aberration compensation method with fast computational speed and high robustness. The method uses bicubic downsampling to smooth the sample phase for reducing its disturbance to the background aberration fit, while reducing the computational effort of aberration compensation. Polynomial coefficients of the aberration fitting are iteratively optimized in the process of minimizing the global phase gradient by improving the phase gradient operator and constructing the loss function to achieve accurate fitting of the phase aberration. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve high aberration compensation accuracy without prior knowledge of the hologram recording settings or manual selection of the background area free of samples, and it is suitable for samples with moderate and relatively flat background area, which can be widely used in the quantitative analysis of biological tissues and micro and nano structures.