High-speed microscopic imaging system with incoherent broadband optical source

Fast microscopic imaging has greatly potential applications in biology, medical science and environment monitoring. The ability to image specimen at high speed is particularly important for inspecting a large quantity in a short period of time. CCD or CMOS cameras are conventionally used for imaging, but has limited frame rate and data throughput. In this report, time-stretch high-speed microscopic imaging systems based on temporally and spectrally shaped incoherent optical source are proposed and experimentally demonstrated. We significantly reduced the complexity of the light source by applying multi-wavelength source or amplified spontaneous noise emission (ASE) in the time-stretch microscopic imaging system. Further-more, by preprocessing the broadband spectrum, the resolution of the proposed system is better than 35 µm and the effective 1D scan rate could reach 50 MHz to 2GHz.