Fast and Lightweight Network for Single Frame Structured Illumination Microscopy Super-Resolution

Xi Cheng, Jun Li, Qiang Dai, Zhenyong Fu, Jian Yang

Abstract: Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) is an important super-resolution-based microscopy technique that breaks the diffraction limit and enhances optical microscopy systems. With the development of biology and medical engineering, there is a high demand for real-time and robust SIM imaging under extreme low-light and short-exposure environments. Existing SIM techniques typically require multiple structured illumination frames to produce a high-resolution image. In this article, we propose a single-frame SIM (SF-SIM) based on deep learning. Our SF-SIM only needs one shot of a structured illumination frame and generates similar results compared with the traditional SIM systems that typically require 15 shots. In our SF-SIM, we propose a noise estimator that can effectively suppress the noise in the image and enable our method to work in the low-light and short-exposure environment without the need for stacking multiple frames for nonlocal denoising. We also design a bandpass attention module that makes our deep network more sensitive to the change of frequency and enhances the imaging quality. Our proposed SF-SIM is almost 14 times faster than traditional SIM methods when achieving similar results. Therefore, our method is significantly valuable for the development of microbiology and medicine.