Optimal principal component analysis-based numerical phase aberration compensation method for digital holography.

In this Letter, an accurate and highly efficient numerical phase aberration compensation method is proposed for digital holographic microscopy. Considering that most parts of the phase aberration resides in the low spatial frequency domain, a Fourier-domain mask is introduced to extract the aberrated frequency components, while rejecting components that are unrelated to the phase aberration estimation. Principal component analysis (PCA) is then performed only on the reduced-sized spectrum, and the aberration terms can be extracted from the first principal component obtained. Finally, by oversampling the reduced-sized aberration terms, the precise phase aberration map is obtained and thus can be compensated by multiplying with its conjugation. Because the phase aberration is estimated from the limited but more relevant raw data, the compensation precision is improved and meanwhile the computation time can be significantly reduced. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed technique could achieve both high compensating accuracy and robustness compared with other developed compensation methods.