Investigations in optoelectronic image processing in scanning laser microscopy

Abstract

A considerable amount of work has been done on scann-ing laser microscopy since its applications were first pointed out by Roberts and Young[1], Minsky [2] and Davidovits et al [3]. The advent of laser has made it possible to focus an intense beam of laser light in a scanning optical microscope (SOM) [4, 5] and hence explore regions of microscopy[6] uncovered by conven-tional microscopy. In the simple SOM [7, 8, 9], the upper spatial frequency in amplitude transmittance or reflectance of an object for which transfer function is nonzero is same as that in a conventional optical microscope. However, in Type II SOM [7] or confocal SOM that employs a coherent or a point detector, the spatial frequency bandwidth is twice that obtained in a conventional microscope. Besides this confocal set-up is found to be very useful in optical sectioning and consequently in 3-D image processing[10, 11, 12] specially of biological specimens. Such systems are also suitable for studies of semiconductor materials [13], super-resolution [14] and various imaginative ways of image processing[15, 16, 17] including phase imaging[18]. A brief survey of related advances in scanning optical microscopy has been covered in the chapter 1 of the thesis. The performance of SOM may be investigated by concent-rating also on signal derived by one dimensional scan of the object specimen. This simplified mode may also be adapted to give wealth of information for biological and semiconductor specimens. Hence we have investigated the design of a scanning laser system suited specifically for studies of line scan image signals of microscopic specimens when probed through a focused laser spot. An electro-mechanical method of scanning of the object specimen has been designed with this aim in mind. Chapter 2, Part A of the thesis deals with the design consider-ations of such a system. For analysis of scan signals at a later instant of time so as to facilitate further processing, an arrangement of microprocessor based recording and measurement of optoelectronic