Fig. 1

Principle of SAsLFM. a Schematic of SAsLFM setup. A petri dish was filled with water to introduce a large spherical aberration into the optical path. A microlens array (MLA) was inserted at the native image plane, and a camera was placed at the back focal plane of the MLA. The sweep of the piezo tilt platform and the trigger of the camera were synchronized to obtain a sequence of light-field images, each of which was shifted by a small interval. Based on the scanning path (3 × 3 scanning period for demonstration), pixels having the same relative position to the center of each microlens were rearranged together to form sub-aperture components. b Illustration of sub-aperture PSFs modification. The light rays passing through different sub-apertures change their original directions when entering the water and ultimately focus at various depths (20 × /0.5NA sLFM and SAsLFM systems with each microlens covering 9 × 9 pixels are used for demonstration). Maximum intensity projections (MIPs) of the 81 sub-aperture PSFs of traditional sLFM and SAsFLM at the depth of − 300 μm are shown on the right for comparison. After the modulation of the spherical aberration, the intensity distributions of sub-aperture PSFs are changed. c Rearranged sub-aperture components of the sLFM data are divided into several groups according to the corresponding sub-aperture positions. Components within the same group are marked with the same color and contain the high-resolution content acquired from a specific depth range. Our phase-space reconstruction algorithm can fully exploit the details contained in the sub-aperture data and merge them during iterations to reveal a large-scale volume with high resolution