The blind structured illumination microscopy strategy proposed by Mudry et al. is fully re-founded in this paper, unveiling the central role of the sparsity of the illumination patterns in the mechanism that drives super-resolution in the method. A numerical analysis shows that the resolving power of the method can be further enhanced with optimized one-photon or two-photon speckle illuminations. A much improved numerical implementation is provided for the reconstruction problem under the image positivity constraint. This algorithm rests on a new preconditioned proximal iteration faster than existing solutions, paving the way to 3D and real-time 2D reconstruction.

In this communication, a fast reconstruction algorithm is proposed for fluorescence blind structured illumination microscopy (SIM) under the sample positivity constraint. This new algorithm is by far simpler and faster than existing solutions, paving the way to 3D and real-time 2D reconstruction.