BDIC: boosting the performance of optical microscopy using blind deconvolution and illumination correction

We propose the combination of single image blind deconvolution and illumination correction (BDIC) to enhance the image quality of a microscopy system. We evaluated the performance this method by calculating the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity of both raw and enhanced images with respect to the reference images. Both subjective and objective assessments show that BDIC increases the image's quality including its contrast and signal-to-noise ratio, without losing image resolution and structural information. To demonstrate its applicability, we also applied BDIC to different samples including plant root tissue and human blood smears.