Wavelength-scanning pixel-super-resolved lens-free on-chip quantitative phase microscopy with a color image sensor

Abstract

We report a wavelength-scanning-based lens-free on-chip microscope using a color CMOS sensor and a matching modified phase retrieval algorithm for pixel super-resolution. Compared to traditional monochrome industrial cameras, color sensors favored by the consumer electronics industry have smaller pixel sizes, higher performance, and lower costs. However, the color filtering array (CFA) introduces inherent modulation to the holograms acquired under quasi-monochromatic illumination, which complicates the data processing in lens-free on-chip microscopy. Without physically removing the CFA positioned on the sensor chip, we demonstrate quantitative phase imaging (QPI) with a lateral half-width resolution of 615 nm over a wide field-of-view of 51.88 mm2 by exploiting the green-channel data from Bayer-masked holograms. The resulting spatial bandwidth product is 137.2 megapixels, over 10 times that of a conventional optical microscope. The rationale for using only green-channel data is that the information from each sampling point is not lost during propagation but rather distributed to all pixels in the image. Therefore, the missing data in other channels can be recovered by exploiting the sufficient differences among the raw images captured at different wavelengths. Compared to the scheme with monochrome sensors, this method requires the acquisition of several more images to guarantee the convergence of the algorithm. Experimental results show that we can achieve high-quality QPI performance, thus demonstrating the applicability of cost-effective color sensors in the field of lens-free holographic microscopy.