Depth-of-field extended Fourier ptychographic microscopy without defocus distance priori

Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) provides a solution of high-throughput phase imaging. Thanks to its coherent imaging model, FPM has the capacity of depth-of-field (DOF) extension by simultaneously recovering the sample’s transmittance function and pupil aberration, which contains a defocus term. However, existing phase retrieval algorithms (PRs) often struggle in the presence of a significant defocus. In this Letter, different PRs with embedded pupil recovery are compared, and the one based on the alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM-FPM) demonstrates promising potential for reconstructing highly defocused FPM images. Besides, we present a plug-and-play framework that integrates ADMM-FPM and total variation or Hessian denoiser for pupil function enhancement. Both simulations and experiments demonstrate that this framework enables robust reconstruction of defocused FPM images without any prior knowledge of defocus distance or sample characteristics. In experiments involving USAF 1951 targets and pathologic slides, ADMM-FPM combined with the Hessian denoiser successfully corrected the defocus up to approximately 200 µm, i.e., extending the DOF to 400 µm.