High-resolution reconstruction and deconvolution of array detector images

Array detector allows a resolution gain for confocal microscopy by combining several images acquired by 32 sub-detectors. A single high resolution image is generally obtained by spatially re-assigning the signal from the 32 sub-detectors and applying a deconvolution procedure. Alternative methods have been proposed to produce high resolution images by linearly combining the signals of sub-detectors. We propose here a novel method that deconvolves directly the stack constituted of 32 spatially re-assigned detectors signals. We demonstrate on both calibration slides and real data that the proposed method allows to produce more homogeneous, well-contrasted, high-resolution images than those obtained with previous methods. All the tested methods have been implemented in an open source software which can be be downloaded for free.