Blind deep-learning based preprocessing method for Fourier ptychographic microscopy

•Noise in FPM low resolution images is composed of the signal-dependent noise and the signal-independent noise.•Noise blocks extracted from dark field low resolution images modeling signal-independent noise is possible.•A way of forming paired training dataset for deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based FPM denoising model is proposed.•BDFP can be extended to process images suffer from other types of degradation in multi-frame super-resolution tasks. Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a technique for tackling the trade-off between the resolution and the imaging field of view by combining the techniques from aperture synthesis and phase retrieval to estimate the complex object from a series of low-resolution intensity images captured under angle-varied illumination. The captured images are commonly corrupted by multiple noise, leading to the degradation of the reconstructed image quality. Typically speaking, the noise model and noise level of the experimental images are unknown, and the traditional image denoising methods have limited effect. In this paper we model the FPM forward imaging process corrupted by noise and divide the noise in the captured images into two parts: the signal-dependent part and the signal-independent part. Based on the noise model we propose a novel blind deep-learning based Fourier ptychographic microscopy preprocessing method, termed BDFP, for removing these two components of noise. First, from a portion of the captured low-resolution images, a set of blocks corresponding to the smooth area of the object are extracted to model signal-independent noise. Second, under the assumption that the signal-dependent noise follows a Poisson distribution, we add Poisson noise and signal-independent noise blocks to clean images to form a paired training dataset, which is then used for training a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model to reduce both signal-dependent noise and signal-independent noise. The proposed blind preprocessing method, combining with typical FPM reconstruction algorithms, is tested on simulated data and experimental images. Experimental results show that our preprocessing method can significantly reduce the noise in the captured images and bring about effective improvements in reconstructed image quality.