Abstract: A particle detection method detects presence and location of particles on a target using measured signals from a plurality of structured illumination patterns. The particle detection method uses measured signals obtained by illuminating the target with structured illumination patterns to detect particles. Specifically, the degree of variation in these measured signals in raw images is calculated to determine whether a particle is present on the target at a particular area of interest.

Abstract: A synthetic aperture optics (SAO) imaging method minimizes the number of selective excitation patterns used to illuminate the imaging target, based on the objects' physical characteristics corresponding to spatial frequency content from the illuminated target and/or one or more parameters of the optical imaging system used for SAO. With the minimized number of selective excitation patterns, the time required to perform SAO is reduced dramatically, thereby allowing SAO to be used with DNA sequencing applications that require massive parallelization for cost reduction and high throughput. In addition, an SAO apparatus optimized to perform the SAO method is provided. The SAO apparatus includes a plurality of interference pattern generation modules that can be arranged in a half-ring shape.