Imaging biological tissue with high-throughput single-pixel compressive holography

Abstract Single-pixel holography (SPH) is capable of generating holographic images with rich spatial information by employing only a single-pixel detector. Thanks to the relatively low dark-noise production, high sensitivity, large bandwidth, and cheap price of single-pixel detectors in comparison to pixel-array detectors, SPH is becoming an attractive imaging modality at wavelengths where pixel-array detectors are not available or prohibitively expensive. Moreover, SPH is particularly advantageous when imaging through scattering media or in scarce illumination with compressive sensing. In the current practice of SPH, the throughput of the system is mainly limited by the phase-encoded illumination and the ways to realize phase stepping. In this work, we developed a high-through single-pixel compressive holography, achieving a space-bandwidth-time product (SBP-T) of 41,667 pixels/s. This result indicates that by using a single-pixel detector, information of holographic images containing up to 65,536 pixels can be collected within only 3 seconds. The high-throughput was realized by enabling phase stepping naturally in time and abandoning the need for phase-encoded illumination. We further show that compressive sensing can be conveniently adapted to significantly reduce the acquisition time. Besides being high throughput, we also show that this holographic system is scalable to provide either a large field of view (~83 mm2) or a high resolution (5.8 μm × 4.3 μm). In particular, high-resolution holographic images of a piece of rat tail were presented, exhibiting rich information of mussel, cortical bone, and cancellous bone. Given that microscopic images of biological tissue has rarely been explored in the current practice of SPH, we anticipate the developed high-throughput SPH is promising to nourish the development of multi-spectrum imaging by providing high-quality holographic images for biological tissues.