A deconvolution method for confocal microscopy with total variation regularization

Confocal laser scanning microscopy is a powerful and increasingly popular technique for 3D imaging of biological specimens. However the acquired images are degraded by blur from out-of-focus light and Poisson noise due to photon-limited detection. Several deconvolution methods have been proposed to reduce these degradations, including the Richardson-Lucy algorithm, which computes a maximum likelihood estimation adapted to Poisson statistics. However this method tends to amplify noise if used without regularizing constraint. Here, we propose to combine the Richardson-Lucy algorithm with a regularizing constraint based on total variation, whose smoothing avoids oscillations while preserving edges. We show on simulated images that this constraint improves the deconvolution result both visually and using quantitative measures.