Spherical object segmentation in digital holographic microscopy by deep-learning

Digital holographic microscopy can image both absorbing and translucent objects. Due to the presence of twin-images and out-of-focus objects, the task of segmenting the objects from a back-propagated hologram is challenging. This paper investigates the use of deep neural networks to combine the real and imaginary parts of the back-propagated wave and produce a segmentation. The network, trained with pairs of back-propagated simulated holograms and ground truth segmentations, is shown to perform well even in the case of a mismatch between the defocus distance of the holograms used during the training step and the actual defocus distance of the holograms at test time.