Embedded parallel Fourier ptychographic microscopy reconstruction system

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) has attracted a wide range of focus for its ability of large space–bandwidth product and quantitative phase imaging. It is a typical computational imaging technique that jointly optimizes imaging hardware and reconstruction algorithms. The data redundancy and inverse problem algorithms are the sources of FPM’s excellent performance. But at the same time, this large amount of data processing and complex algorithms also evidently reduce the imaging speed. To accelerate the FPM reconstruction speed, we proposed a fast FPM reconstruction framework consisting of three levels of parallel computation and implemented it with an embedded computing module. In the conventional FPM framework, the sample image is divided into multiple sub-regions to process separately because the illumination angles and defocus distances for different sub-regions may also be different. Our parallel framework first performs digital refocusing and high-resolution reconstruction for each sub-region separately and then stitches the complex sub-regions together to obtain the final high-resolution complex image. The feasibility of the proposed parallel FPM reconstruction framework is verified with different experimental results acquired with the system we built.