LAUSR

Portable, low‐cost smartphone platform microscopic systems have emerged as a potential tool for imaging of various micron and submicron scale particles in recent years (Ozcan; Pirnstill and Coté; Breslauer et al.; Zhu et al.). In most of the reported works, it involves either the use of sophisticated optical set‐ups along with a high‐end computational tool for postprocessing of the captured images, or it requires a high‐end configured smartphone to obtain enhanced imaging of the sample. Present work reports the working of a low‐cost, field‐portable 520× optical microscope using a smartphone. The proposed smartphone microscopic system has been designed by attaching a 3D printed compact optical set‐up to the rear camera of a regular smartphone. By using cloud‐based services, an image processing algorithm has been developed which can be accessed anytime through a mobile broadband network. Using this facility, the quality of the captured images can be further enhanced, thus obviating the need for dedicated computational tools for postprocessing of the images. With the designed microscopic system, an optical resolution ∼2 µm has been obtained. Upon postprocessing, the resolution of the captured images can be improved further. It is envisioned that with properly designed optical set‐up in 3D printer and by developing an image processing application in the cloud, it is possible to obtain a low‐cost, user‐friendly, field‐portable optical microscope on a regular smartphone that performs at par with that of a laboratory‐grade microscope.