I’m at the OSA Topical Meeting on Computational Optical Sensing and Imaging this week, co-located with the annual meeting. My favorite results are super-resolution studies presented, for example, in a talk on single molecule imaging by W. E. Moerner. Moerner is collaborating with Raphael Pieston on the use of longitudinally coded PSF’s for 3D molecular imaging. I was most impressed by his images using photoactivated localization microscopy, which show far sub-wavelength lateral resolution.
On the topic of resolution, Sukhakar Prasad also gave an excellent talk on information theoretic limits. His talk suggests that frequency extrapolation works better for low space bandwidth product systems. This in turn suggests that reasonable super-resolution might be obtained in confocal systems. Of course, the combination of confocal systems with a coded Piestun PSF seems to enable 3D super-resolution.