Information efficient and accurate Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM)

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM), as presented at the DGaO-Conference 2009, promises to be a convenient new method to inspect the micro topography of smooth and rough surfaces. SIM is based on projecting a grating in the focal plane of a micro objective and measuring the local contrast of this grating image while scanning the object along the optical axis. There is a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency of the sensor. Therefore the major questions are: "How many exposures do we have to take? How does the measuring uncertainty depend on the number of exposures? What is the best model to describe the signal generation in the sensor?" We will discuss these questions, based on theory and experiments, and will compare SIM to competing methods. We will demonstrate that with optimized algorithms SIM is highly efficient, compared to White Light Interferometry.