Snapshot 3D imaging with a gigapixel-scale multi-aperture microscope

We present a gigapixel-scale multi-aperture microscope capable of measuring a sample’s 3D height profile over multi-centimeter-scale fields of view with a series of single synchronized camera snapshots. Exploiting the overlap redundancy in our multi-aperture camera array microscope, we developed a novel, end-to-end photogrammetric reconstruction algorithm that simultaneously calibrates the cameras’ 3D positions and poses, stitches the acquired images, and generates a coregistered, pixel-wise 3D height map of the sample. Our work opens the door to video-rate 3D monitoring of dynamic scenes at micrometer-scale resolutions and centimeter-scale fields of view.