A Practical Approach for Optimizing Off-axis Telecentric Digital Holographic Microscope Design

Abstract

Digital holographic microscopy (DHM) has become an attractive imaging tool for the analysis of living cells and histological tissues. The telecentric DHM (TDHM) is a configuration of DHM that lightens the computation load with a priori aberration corrections. However, TDHM requires a well-aligned optical pipeline to optimize its resolution and image quality (IQ), which has traditionally complicated the alignment process. Further deriving from the optical interference functions, we offer a set of methodologies to simplify TDHM design and alignment by determining the optimal +1 order position, which depends on the object-reference beam angle and the interference plane rotation angle. The methods are then experimentally tested and verified on a TDHM system by imaging living HeLa cells in suspension.