Ambiguity function used for detection of confocal microscope

In the conventional confocal microscope, the alignment of physical pinholes is an important problem. In this paper, a digital pinhole filter based on image restoration is investigated for the confocal microscope. Firstly, we discuss the properties of ambiguity function. Next, we use it to build the off-focus point spread function (PSF). Then, we use image restoration technique based on inverse filtering method to reject out-of-focus light in order to improve the depth resolution. Experimental results indicate that the method can reduce the pixel crosstalk resulting from out-of-focus light, and the alignment of pinholes can be made easy.