Phase Contrast Image Restoration by Formulating Its Imaging Principle and Reversing the Formulation With Deep Neural Networks

Phase contrast microscopy, as a noninvasive imaging technique, has been widely used to monitor the behavior of transparent cells without staining or altering them. Due to the optical principle of the specifically-designed microscope, phase contrast microscopy images contain artifacts such as halo and shade-off which hinder the cell segmentation and detection tasks. Some previous works developed simplified computational imaging models for phase contrast microscopes by linear approximations and convolutions. The approximated models do not exactly reflect the imaging principle of the phase contrast microscope and accordingly the image restoration by solving the corresponding deconvolution process is not perfect. In this paper, we revisit the optical principle of the phase contrast microscope to precisely formulate its imaging model without any approximation. Based on this model, we propose an image restoration procedure by reversing this imaging model with a deep neural network, instead of mathematically deriving the inverse operator of the model which is technically impossible. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the newly derived phase contrast microscopy imaging model and the power of the deep neural network on modeling the inverse imaging procedure. Moreover, the restored images enable that high quality cell segmentation task can be easily achieved by simply thresholding methods. Implementations of this work are publicly available at https://github.com/LiangHann/Phase-Contrast-Microscopy-Image-Restoration.