"Large depth-of-field microscopic structured-light 3D imaging with focus stacking" (2023)

L. Chen and S. Zhang, “Large depth-of-field microscopic structured-light 3D imaging with focus stacking”, Optics and Lasers in Engineering 167, 107623 (2023)

Abstract

State-of-the-art microscopic structured-light (SL) three-dimensional (3D) imaging systems typically use conventional lenses with a fixed focal length achieving a limited depth of field (DOF). This paper proposes to drastically increase the DOF of the microscopic 3D imaging by leveraging the focus stacking technique and developing a novel computational framework. We first capture fringe images with various camera focal lengths using an electrically tunable lens (ETL) and align the recovered phase maps using phase constraints. Then, we extract the focused pixel phase using fringe contrast and stitch them into an all-in-focus phase map via energy minimization. Finally, we reconstruct the 3D shape using the all-in-focus phase map. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve a large DOF of approximately 2 mm and field of view (FOV) of approximately 4 mm × 3 mm with a pixel size at the object space of approximately 2.6 μm. The achieved DOF is approximately 10× the DOF of the system without the proposed method.