Phase estimation of illumination pattern in structured illumination microscopy

Conventional structured illumination microscopy (SIM) methods require precise knowledge of the illumination pattern and assume the sample to be stationary during the acquisition. Fulfilling these two conditions in practice is difficult. Therefore, the estimation of illumination pattern from acquired images is necessary. Inaccurate estimation of spatial frequency, angular orientation or phase shift of the illumination pattern leads to unwanted image reconstruction artifacts. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different phase estimation approaches using simulated SIM data from a synthetic sample.