Stereo vision in spatial-light-modulator–based microscopy

We propose a technique for realizing stereoscopic microscopy. We employ a spatial-light-modulator-based microscope to record two images under different angles in one shot. We additionally investigate the possibilities of dynamic aberration correction. It is found that aberration correction is unavoidable because of the employed commercial liquid crystal on a silicon modulator. Also, imaging of phase objects and highly reflective specimens is experimentally investigated. For some of the specimens, an inversion of the recorded intensity is observed, which leads to problems when viewing the stereo pairs. We explain the origin of this effect and show that a reasonable visualization of microscopic three-dimensional objects can be achieved by simple image inversion.