Synthetic aperture microscopy using off-axis illumination and polarization coding

A new method to improve the resolution of optical imaging systems beyond the classical Rayleigh resolution limit is presented. The technique relies on synthetic aperture generation in three stages. The first one (encoding stage) uses an illumination procedure that combines both on-axis and off-axis illumination beams with different polarization states onto the object. After the imaging system, a second stage (decoding stage) allows the recovering of the encoded spatial-frequency object information by means of an interferometric configuration based on the polarization coding carried out in the previous stage. Finally, a third stage (digital post-processing stage) is used to generate a synthetic aperture that is three times larger than the conventional aperture of the imaging system. The whole process allows us to obtain a superresolved image of the object. Experimental implementation of the approach for a commercial microscope objective is presented. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.