Theoretical demonstration of partially coherent Fourier light field microscopy for single-shot three-dimensional imaging

Fourier light field microscopy (FLFM) has emerged as a valuable tool for single-shot three-dimensional imaging largely due to its ability to reduce reconstruction artifacts and facilitate efficient parallel processing. However, existing research primarily concentrates on fluorescence imaging, where detection signals are incoherent, and suffer from resolution limitations inherent to the parallel sampling nature of the microlens array. This paper introduces a partially coherent FLFM (pc-FLFM) for weakly scattering samples by integrating annular partially coherent illumination (PCI) with a spectrum filtering strategy. By implementing filtering at the Fourier plane of the objective, we effectively suppress the background noise associated with PCI, thereby enhancing the accuracy of 3D image reconstruction through the Richardson-Lucy algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate that pc-FLFM achieves a resolution that is approximately 20% superior to conventional incoherent image techniques, signifying a notable enhancement in image quality. Furthermore, the proposed approach exhibits a significant reduction in computational complexity (over two orders of magnitude). This facilitates efficient simulation of diverse imaging scenarios, enabling the development of an optimized experimental strategy before resource-intensive physical experiments. Thus, pc-FLFM emerges as a transformative tool for single-shot, high-resolution 3D imaging for weakly scattering samples, pushing the boundaries of current optical microscopy techniques.