Prior Visual-Guided Self-Supervised Learning Enables Color Vignetting Correction for High-Throughput Microscopic Imaging

Vignetting constitutes a prevalent optical degradation that significantly compromises the quality of biomedical microscopic imaging. However, a robust and efficient vignetting correction methodology in multi-channel microscopic images remains absent at present. In this paper, we take advantage of a prior knowledge about the homogeneity of microscopic images and radial attenuation property of vignetting to develop a self-supervised deep learning algorithm that achieves complex vignetting removal in color microscopic images. Our proposed method, vignetting correction lookup table (VCLUT), is trainable on both single and multiple images, which employs adversarial learning to effectively transfer good imaging conditions from the user visually defined central region of its own light field to the entire image. To illustrate its effectiveness, we performed individual correction experiments on data from five distinct biological specimens. The results demonstrate that VCLUT exhibits enhanced performance compared to classical methods. We further examined its performance as a multi-image-based approach on a pathological dataset, revealing its advantage over other state-of-the-art approaches in both qualitative and quantitative measurements. Moreover, it uniquely possesses the capacity for generalization across various levels of vignetting intensity and an ultra-fast model computation capability, rendering it well-suited for integration into high-throughput imaging pipelines of digital microscopy.