Research on marine plankton imaging based on digital holographic technology

Abstract

In this paper, a novel approach was implemented to image the marine plankton using the in-line digital holographic technology. the digital holography can image all plankton in a certain volume and more information can be recorded including the intensity and phase information. Moreover, the lensless system cases no aberrations and reduces the complexity of structure. In the process of hologram reconstruction, numerical algorithms were developed based on the angle spectrum theory. In the experiments of marine plankton, some technical issues, such as reconstruction algorithm, numerical refocusing, zero-order term suppression, were discussed. We can obtain the reconstructing image layer by layer at different distances by changing the distance step, which demonstrates that digital holographic imaging is capable of digital refocusing. Digital holographic imaging has clear advantages over other optical methods for the analysis of marine plankton, which contributes to further microorganism identification in the oceanographic observation by using the digital image processing and microscopy techniques.