March 19, 11 am at CEMES (coffee served by 10.30 am)

Conference room + Zoom

by Emmanuel Soubiés, CNRS  researcher at IRIT, Toulouse

In this talk, I will begin by introducing and illustrating a fundamental tool in signal and image processing: the Fourier transform. This tool can be used to analyse the performance limits of imaging systems, in other words, how far can an imaging system see? In this context, I will focus on two microscopy techniques:

– Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM), a fluorescence microscopy technique that doubles the resolution of conventional microscopes and exceeds the diffraction limit. We will see how Fourier analysis provides an intuitive understanding of the origin of this gain in resolution.

– ISOM (Interference Scanning Optical Probe Microscopy), developed by Wolfgang Bacsa at CEMES. Unlike SIM, this technique does not require fluorescent labelling. I will present the recent results of our collaboration, in which we propose a theoretical study of the resolution achievable by ISOM using Fourier analysis. This work highlights the potential of this approach and opens up exciting prospects.

In both cases, I will discuss the mathematical problems posed by image reconstruction and show how Fourier analysis can also guide the design of algorithms.