Automatic and robust phase aberration compensation for digital holographic microscopy based on minimizing total standard deviation

•An automatic and robust phase aberration compensation method for DHM is proposed.•This method requires no manual operation or prior knowledge of the recording system.•Not only phase curvature but also high order aberrations could be corrected.•Both the global and the local phase variations are considered in the TSD calculation.•Simulation and experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. A totally automatic and robust phase aberration compensation method is proposed for digital holographic microscopy. The correction needs no manual operation or prior knowledge of the recording setup. As the phase aberrations are modeled with orthogonal polynomials, not only phase curvature but also high order aberrations could be corrected with a single hologram. The polynomial coefficients are obtained in an optimization procedure by minimizing the total standard deviation, i.e., the sum of local standard deviation of the compensated phase map. Since both the global and the local phase variations are considered, the proposed method is more accurate and robust than the state-of-the-art numerical methods with the existence of abrupt edges and phase noise. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated with numerical simulation and the experimental results of mouse osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 living cells and USAF 1951 resolution target.