Adaptive Under-Sampling Deep Neural Network for Rapid and Reliable Image Recovery in Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope Measurements

Confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) is a non-destructive optical measurement system of high precision, applicable to the construction of three-dimensional (3-D) topographies of biological cells and engineered materials at the micro- and sub-micro scales. Compressive sensing (CS) has recently been applied in microscope systems to reduce the amount of sampled data required for the reconstruction of images; however, the iterative nature of the CS recovery algorithm imposes high computational complexity. This article presents an end-to-end non-iterative deep residual convolutional neural network (CNN) applicable to CLSM systems for CS-based reconstruction. In experiments and numerical simulations, the proposed scheme outperformed the existing CS recovery algorithms in terms of reconstructed image quality and computation time. The proposed algorithm also enabled the reconstruction of images using samples obtained in different regions of an image at various sampling rates to overcome nonuniform information density. The reconstruction performance of the model in terms of robustness and efficiency was validated using real-world CLSM data obtained via random scanning patterns.