Fourier ptychographic microscopy with multi-height illumination based on energy threshold pre-search

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) technology combines the concepts of synthetic aperture imaging, ptychography, and phase retrieval to address the contradiction between the large field of view and high resolution in traditional microscopy and can achieve high-resolution amplitude and phase images with a large field of view. However, for most samples, the primary information is concentrated in the low-frequency region, and traditional single-height FPM may suffer from insufficient sampling, leading to low reconstruction accuracy. In addition, the reconstruction process typically requires a large number of low-resolution images, which also significantly reduces the reconstruction efficiency. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a form of FPM with multi-height illumination based on an energy threshold pre-search. This method simply involves moving the LED array to three planes for multi-height sample illumination on the traditional FPM hardware, thus improving the sampling conditions and enhancing the reconstruction accuracy. The low-resolution images acquired in this way are then screened using an energy threshold method to select images with higher energy, and a phase retrieval method is employed to reconstruct high-resolution complex amplitude images. The results of simulations and experiments demonstrate that compared to traditional methods, our approach not only improves the reconstruction accuracy but also reduces the number of low-resolution images by at least approximately 60%, thereby significantly enhancing the reconstruction efficiency.