A problem in high magnification microscopy is the blurring in the imaging of an object. In this article, we demonstrate a restoration technique that simultaneously makes use of the confocal image and the wide-field image. These images can be acquired by a modified conventional microscope. In front of the light-source, there is an array of pinholes. There are no pinholes at the detection plane. Instead, one or more pixels from the CCD camera are used, where the pinholes would have been. Using all pixels gives the wide-field image, but using a selected subset can give a confocal image. The array is used to speed up the process of acquiring the image. Note that the speed of acquisition is proportional to the number of pinholes. We show that the restoration from the two images can lead to a better result than using only one of the images. If this is the case, we show that a distance of 5 times the diameter of the pinholes can give the same results as a distance of 20 times after deconvolution. This offers an increase in acquisition time of a factor 16.
Copyright 2004 Wiley-Liss, Inc.