Improving resolution of fluorescent microscopy using speckle illumination and joint sparse recovery

A variety of far-field super-resolution microscopy techniques have been proposed recently by exploiting nonlinear phenomenon in optics or specialized photo-switchable probes. Here, we present a linear optics based super-resolution microscopy for standard probes and experimental protocols. Rather than exploiting the nonlinearity in optics or photo-switchable probes, we use a nonlinear reconstruction algorithm that exploits joint sparsity of fluorescent emission from multiple random illumination. To maximize the resolution improvement owing to the joint sparsity, spatially incoherent speckle illumination is used for conventional epi-fluorescence microscopy setup. Experimental results obtained from a nano-pattern and bio-samples stained with standard fluorescent probes along with the proposed method demonstrate that a resolution of up to 37nm can be achieved.