Neural Blind Deconvolution for Image Scanning Microscopy

Eliot Guez, Nathan Buskulic, Lisa Cuneo, Luca Calatroni, Giuseppe Vicidomini

Image scanning microscopy (ISM) acquires one scanned image per detector element, which are then fused into a single image by multi-image deconvolution to obtain a super-resolved image. Its accuracy, however, depends on point spread function (PSF) models that sample- and system-induced aberrations often invalidate. Since differences between the scanned images encode aberration information, we propose a training-free blind Deep Image Prior (DIP) framework that jointly estimates the specimen and the detector-dependent PSFs. The PSFs are parametrised through the detector geometry and shared excitation and emission PSFs, reducing the unknowns while preserving the physical ISM model, and a Gaussian pre-initialisation stabilises the blind optimisation. On experimental tubulin data, blind DIP recovers finer filamentous structures than multi-image deconvolution and DIP with fixed theoretical PSFs, while adapting the PSFs to the measurements.