Noise-robust phase-space deconvolution for light-field microscopy

SIGNIFICANCE: Light-field microscopy has achieved success in various applications of life sciences that require high-speed volumetric imaging. However, existing light-field reconstruction algorithms degrade severely in low-light conditions, and the deconvolution process is time-consuming. AIM: This study aims to develop a noise robustness phase-space deconvolution method with low computational costs. APPROACH: We reformulate the light-field phase-space deconvolution model into the Fourier domain with random-subset ordering and total-variation (TV) regularization. Additionally, we build a time-division-based multicolor light-field microscopy and conduct the three-dimensional (3D) imaging of the heart beating in zebrafish larva at over 95 Hz with a low light dose. RESULTS: We demonstrate that this approach reduces computational resources, brings a tenfold speedup, and achieves a tenfold improvement for the noise robustness in terms of SSIM over the state-of-the-art approach. CONCLUSIONS: We proposed a phase-space deconvolution algorithm for 3D reconstructions in fluorescence imaging. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, we show significant improvement in both computational effectiveness and noise robustness; we further demonstrated practical application on zebrafish larva with low exposure and low light dose.