What is resolution? A statistical minimax testing perspective on superresolution microscopy

DOI10.1214/20-AOS2037zbMATH Open1483.62117arXiv2005.07450OpenAlexW3201885496MaRDI QIDQ2054497FDOQ2054497

Authors: Gytis Kulaitis, Axel Munk, Frank Werner 

Publication date: 3 December 2021

Published in: The Annals of Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: As a general rule of thumb the resolution of a light microscope (i.e. the ability to discern objects) is predominantly described by the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of its point spread function (psf)---the diameter of the blurring density at half of its maximum. Classical wave optics suggests a linear relationship between FWHM and resolution also manifested in the well known Abbe and Rayleigh criteria, dating back to the end of 19th century. However, during the last two decades conventional light microscopy has undergone a shift from microscopic scales to nanoscales. This increase in resolution comes with the need to incorporate the random nature of observations (light photons) and challenges the classical view of discernability, as we argue in this paper. Instead, we suggest a statistical description of resolution obtained from such random data. Our notion of discernability is based on statistical testing whether one or two objects with the same total intensity are present. For Poisson measurements we get linear dependence of the (minimax) detection boundary on the FWHM, whereas for a homogeneous Gaussian model the dependence of resolution is nonlinear. Hence, at small physical scales modeling by homogeneous gaussians is inadequate, although often implicitly assumed in many reconstruction algorithms. In contrast, the Poisson model and its variance stabilized Gaussian approximation seem to provide a statistically sound description of resolution at the nanoscale. Our theory is also applicable to other imaging setups, such as telescopes.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.07450

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zbMATH Keywords

minimaxdetection boundaryequivalence of experimentsmicroscopy(super)resolutionnanoscopy

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Parametric hypothesis testing (62F03) Applications of statistics in engineering and industry; control charts (62P30) Minimax procedures in statistical decision theory (62C20) Image analysis in multivariate analysis (62H35) Image processing (compression, reconstruction, etc.) in information and communication theory (94A08)

Cites Work

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Cited In (6)

• A general axiomatic system for image resolution quantification
• A stochastic analysis of distance estimation approaches in single molecule microscopy: quantifying the resolution limits of photon-limited imaging systems
• Statistical and Information-Theoretic Analysis of Resolution in Imaging
• Optimal parameter estimation for linear SPDEs from multiple measurements
• How to describe spatial resolution: an approach similar to the central limit theorem
• A minimax testing perspective on spatial statistical resolution in microscopy

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