View images with unprecedented resolution in integral microscopy

Integral, or lightfield, microscopy, is a novel technique that allows the capture, after a single shot, of multiple view images of microscopic specimens. This capacity, however, is achieved at the cost of a significant reduction of the spatial resolution capability. Currently, it is assumed that in the best cases the resolution is reduced by a factor that is not smaller than ten, what poses a hard drawback to the utility of the technique. However, to the best of our knowledge, this resolution frontier has never been researched rigorously. For this reason, in this paper we design an experiment for setting the spatial-resolution limit of integral microscopy. From the experiment we demonstrate that integral microscopy can produce optically, with a single shot, a collection of perspective images, each with even the same resolution as the host microscope. This result opens a wide range of new possibilities of using integral microscopy in any imaging application were submicron resolution is required.