Fast and accurate sCMOS noise correction for fluorescence microscopy

The rapid development of scientific CMOS (sCMOS) technology has greatly advanced optical microscopy for biomedical research with superior sensitivity, resolution, field-of-view, and frame rates. However, for sCMOS sensors, the parallel charge-voltage conversion and different responsivity at each pixel induces extra readout and pattern noise compared to charge-coupled devices (CCD) and electron-multiplying CCD (EM-CCD) sensors. This can produce artifacts, deteriorate imaging capability, and hinder quantification of fluorescent signals, thereby compromising strategies to reduce photo-damage to live samples. Here, we propose a content-adaptive algorithm for the automatic correction of sCMOS-related noise (ACsN) for fluorescence microscopy. ACsN combines camera physics and layered sparse filtering to significantly reduce the most relevant noise sources in a sCMOS sensor while preserving the fine details of the signal. The method improves the camera performance, enabling fast, low-light and quantitative optical microscopy with video-rate denoising for a broad range of imaging conditions and modalities.