Universal evaluation and design of imaging systems using information estimation

Information theory, which describes the transmission of signals in the presence of noise, has enabled the development of reliable communication systems that underlie the modern world. Imaging systems can also be viewed as a form of communication, in which information about the object is "transmitted" through images. However, the application of information theory to imaging systems has been limited by the challenges of accounting for their physical constraints. Here, we introduce a framework that addresses these limitations by modeling the probabilistic relationship between objects and their measurements. Using this framework, we develop a method to estimate information using only a dataset of noisy measurements, without making any assumptions about the image formation process. We demonstrate that these estimates comprehensively quantify measurement quality across a diverse range of imaging systems and applications. Furthermore, we introduce Information-Driven Encoder Analysis Learning (IDEAL), a technique to optimize the design of imaging hardware for maximum information capture. This work provides new insights into the fundamental performance limits of imaging systems and offers powerful new tools for their analysis and design.

Noise2Image: Noise-Enabled Static Scene Recovery for Event Cameras

Event cameras capture changes of intensity over time as a stream of 'events' and generally cannot measure intensity itself; hence, they are only used for imaging dynamic scenes. However, fluctuations due to random photon arrival inevitably trigger noise events, even for static scenes. While previous efforts have been focused on filtering out these undesirable noise events to improve signal quality, we find that, in the photon-noise regime, these noise events are correlated with the static scene intensity. We analyze the noise event generation and model its relationship to illuminance. Based on this understanding, we propose a method, called Noise2Image, to leverage the illuminance-dependent noise characteristics to recover the static parts of a scene, which are otherwise invisible to event cameras. We experimentally collect a dataset of noise events on static scenes to train and validate Noise2Image. Our results show that Noise2Image can robustly recover intensity images solely from noise events, providing a novel approach for capturing static scenes in event cameras, without additional hardware.

Unified, Verifiable Neural Simulators for Electromagnetic Wave Inverse Problems

Simulators based on neural networks offer a path to orders-of-magnitude faster electromagnetic wave simulations. Existing models, however, only address narrowly tailored classes of problems and only scale to systems of a few dozen degrees of freedom (DoFs). Here, we demonstrate a single, unified model capable of addressing scattering simulations with thousands of DoFs, of any wavelength, any illumination wavefront, and freeform materials, within broad configurable bounds. Based on an attentional multi-conditioning strategy, our method also allows non-recurrent supervision on and prediction of intermediate physical states, which provides improved generalization with no additional data-generation cost. Using this O(1)-time intermediate prediction capability, we propose and prove a rigorous, efficiently computable upper bound on prediction error, allowing accuracy guarantees at inference time for all predictions. After training solely on randomized systems, we demonstrate the unified model across a suite of challenging multi-disciplinary inverse problems, finding strong efficacy and speed improvements up to 96% for problems in optical tomography, beam shaping through volumetric random media, and freeform photonic inverse design, with no problem-specific training. Our findings demonstrate a path to universal, verifiably accurate neural surrogates for existing scattering simulators, and our conditioning and training methods are directly applicable to any PDE admitting a time-domain iterative solver.

Wavefront Randomization Improves Deconvolution

The performance of an imaging system is limited by optical aberrations, which cause blurriness in the resulting image. Digital correction techniques, such as deconvolution, have limited ability to correct the blur, since some spatial frequencies in the scene are not measured adequately (i.e., 'zeros' of the system transfer function). We prove that the addition of a random mask to an imaging system removes its dependence on aberrations, reducing the likelihood of zeros in the transfer function and consequently decreasing the sensitivity to noise during deconvolution. In simulation, we show that this strategy improves image quality over a range of aberration types, aberration strengths, and signal-to-noise ratios.

The Berkeley Single Cell Computational Microscopy (BSCCM) Dataset

Computational microscopy, in which hardware and algorithms of an imaging system are jointly designed, shows promise for making imaging systems that cost less, perform more robustly, and collect new types of information. Often, the performance of computational imaging systems, especially those that incorporate machine learning, is sample-dependent. Thus, standardized datasets are an essential tool for comparing the performance of different approaches. Here, we introduce the Berkeley Single Cell Computational Microscopy (BSCCM) dataset, which contains over ~12,000,000 images of 400,000 of individual white blood cells. The dataset contains images captured with multiple illumination patterns on an LED array microscope and fluorescent measurements of the abundance of surface proteins that mark different cell types. We hope this dataset will provide a valuable resource for the development and testing of new algorithms in computational microscopy and computer vision with practical biomedical applications.

Roadmap on Deep Learning for Microscopy

Through digital imaging, microscopy has evolved from primarily being a means for visual observation of life at the micro- and nano-scale, to a quantitative tool with ever-increasing resolution and throughput. Artificial intelligence, deep neural networks, and machine learning are all niche terms describing computational methods that have gained a pivotal role in microscopy-based research over the past decade. This Roadmap is written collectively by prominent researchers and encompasses selected aspects of how machine learning is applied to microscopy image data, with the aim of gaining scientific knowledge by improved image quality, automated detection, segmentation, classification and tracking of objects, and efficient merging of information from multiple imaging modalities. We aim to give the reader an overview of the key developments and an understanding of possibilities and limitations of machine learning for microscopy. It will be of interest to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in the physical sciences and life sciences.

BiPMAP: A Toolbox for Predictions of Perceived Motion Artifacts on Modern Displays

Presenting dynamic scenes without incurring motion artifacts visible to observers requires sustained effort from the display industry. A tool that predicts motion artifacts and simulates artifact elimination through optimizing the display configuration is highly desired to guide the design and manufacture of modern displays. Despite the popular demands, there is no such tool available in the market. In this study, we deliver an interactive toolkit, Binocular Perceived Motion Artifact Predictor (BiPMAP), as an executable file with GPU acceleration. BiPMAP accounts for an extensive collection of user-defined parameters and directly visualizes a variety of motion artifacts by presenting the perceived continuous and sampled moving stimuli side-by-side. For accurate artifact predictions, BiPMAP utilizes a novel model of the human contrast sensitivity function to effectively imitate the frequency modulation of the human visual system. In addition, BiPMAP is capable of deriving various in-plane motion artifacts for 2D displays and depth distortion in 3D stereoscopic displays.

Linear Revolution-Invariance: Modeling and Deblurring Spatially-Varying Imaging Systems

We develop theory and algorithms for modeling and deblurring imaging systems that are composed of rotationally-symmetric optics. Such systems have point spread functions (PSFs) which are spatially-varying, but only vary radially, a property we call linear revolution-invariance (LRI). From the LRI property we develop an exact theory for linear imaging with radially-varying optics, including an analog of the Fourier Convolution Theorem. This theory, in tandem with a calibration procedure using Seidel aberration coefficients, yields an efficient forward model and deblurring algorithm which requires only a single calibration image -- one that is easier to measure than a single PSF. We test these methods in simulation and experimentally on images of resolution targets, rabbit liver tissue, and live tardigrades obtained using the UCLA Miniscope v3. We find that the LRI forward model generates accurate radially-varying blur, and LRI deblurring improves resolution, especially near the edges of the field-of-view. These methods are available for use as a Python package at https://github.com/apsk14/lri.

Dynamic Structured Illumination Microscopy with a Neural Space-time Model

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) reconstructs a super-resolved image from multiple raw images; hence, acquisition speed is limited, making it unsuitable for dynamic scenes. We propose a new method, Speckle Flow SIM, that models sample motion during the data capture in order to reconstruct dynamic scenes with super-resolution. Speckle Flow SIM uses fixed speckle illumination and relies on sample motion to capture a sequence of raw images. Then, the spatio-temporal relationship of the dynamic scene is modeled using a neural space-time model with coordinate-based multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), and the motion dynamics and the super-resolved scene are jointly recovered. We validated Speckle Flow SIM in simulation and built a simple, inexpensive experimental setup with off-the-shelf components. We demonstrated that Speckle Flow SIM can reconstruct a dynamic scene with deformable motion and 1.88x the diffraction-limited resolution in experiment.

Dancing under the stars: video denoising in starlight

Imaging in low light is extremely challenging due to low photon counts. Using sensitive CMOS cameras, it is currently possible to take videos at night under moonlight (0.05-0.3 lux illumination). In this paper, we demonstrate photorealistic video under starlight (no moon present, $<$0.001 lux) for the first time. To enable this, we develop a GAN-tuned physics-based noise model to more accurately represent camera noise at the lowest light levels. Using this noise model, we train a video denoiser using a combination of simulated noisy video clips and real noisy still images. We capture a 5-10 fps video dataset with significant motion at approximately 0.6-0.7 millilux with no active illumination. Comparing against alternative methods, we achieve improved video quality at the lowest light levels, demonstrating photorealistic video denoising in starlight for the first time.