Pixel super-resolved lensfree on-chip microscopybased on dual laterally shifting modulation

Achieving high spatial resolution over a wide field of view (FOV) is the goal of many imaging systems. In a traditional lens-based microscope, designing a complex objective with high numerical aperture (NA) to achieve this goal is a tough and challenging task. The lens-free wide-field imaging method based on phase retrieval provides a new way to bypass the trade-off between the spatial resolution and FOV of conventional microscopy. However, the typical lens-free microscopy usually requires mechanical devices with high precision and repeatability. In this paper, we report a robust and cost-effective pixel super-resolved lens-free imaging method based on dual laterally shifting modulation. A thin diffuser is inserted between the object and the image sensor to be used as the modulator. The diffuser and the object are transversely scanned at the same time to add diversities for phase retrieval and pixel super-resolution, respectively. In this way, the positional shifts of the diffuser and the object can be directly recovered with the registration algorithm, thus addressing the low stability and inaccuracy issues of translation stages. We also propose a pixel super-resolution phase-retrieval algorithm to recover the object and the unknown diffuser. We first use numerical simulations to evaluate the proposed scheme. Then, we validate this approach by imaging a resolution target and a pollen sample, thus achieving an FOV of ${\sim}{30}\;{\text{mm}^2}$∼30mm2 and a half-pitch resolution of 0.78 µm, which surpasses 2.14 times the theoretical Nyquist–Shannon sampling resolution limit. Finally, the 3D refocusing ability is also verified by imaging a thick mosquito sample.