Automatic compensation of phase aberrations in digital holographic microscopy for living cells investigation by using spectral energy analysis

Phase aberration compensation is crucial for quantitative phase-contrast imaging in digital holographic microscopy. In this paper, an automatic compensation method is proposed for living cells investigation in digital holographic microscopy. The phase aberrations are extracted and corrected automatically with a single hologram by using spectral energy analysis. Zernike polynomials are adopted to model the phase aberrations. The polynomial coefficients related to the amount of phase aberrations are calculated in a nonlinear optimization procedure, in which a spectral energy metric that places more weight on low-frequency components is maximized. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with experimental result of mouse osteoblastic living cells. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.