Solving equations after dense scan to improve the resolutions of microscopes

Abstract: Super-resolution techniques overcome the diffraction-limit and get very high resolutions. A category of these techniques, e.g., STED achieves this by creating an illumination spot smaller than the Airy Disk. As a result, points are distinguishable even if they are as small as the spot. In order to further observe structures smaller than the spot itself, a technique called DDS scans the sample more densely, and recovers the expected image by deconvolution. In that technique, the deconvolution is achieved by filtering which requires some peripheral areas to be scanned together with the region of interest. In this study, an approach is proposed which has the same preprocessing stage as DDS. But it requires to scan only the region of interest. After that, an equation system is got from the scanned data. Finally, the expected image is recovered by solving the equation system. Experiments are performed on simulated data, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The experiments also suggest that the proposed approach is more efficient than the existing one especially when the expected resolution is high.