Compressive phase retrieval

Abstract

Recovering a full description of a wave from limited intensity measurements remains a central problem in optics. Optical waves oscillate too fast for detectors to measure anything but time{averaged intensities. This is unfortunate since the phase can reveal important information about the object. When the light is partially coherent, a complete description of the phase requires knowledge about the statistical correlations for each pair of points in space. Recovery of the correlation function is a much more challenging problem since the number of pairs grows much more rapidly than the number of points. In this thesis, quantitative phase imaging techniques that works for partially coherent illuminations are investigated. In order to recover the phase information with few measurements, the sparsity in each underly problem and ecient inversion methods are explored under the framework of compressed sensing. In each phase retrieval technique under study, diffraction during spatial propagation is exploited as an effective and convenient mechanism to uniformly distribute the information about the unknown signal into the measurement space. Holography is useful to record the scattered field from a sparse distribution of particles; the ability of localizing each particles using compressive reconstruction method is studied. When a thin sample is illuminated with partially coherent waves, the transport of intensity phase retrieval method is shown to be eective to recover the optical path length of the sample and remove the eect of the illumination. This technique is particularly suitable for X-ray phase imaging since it does not require a coherent source or any optical components. Compressive tomographic reconstruction, which makes full use of the priors that the sample consists of piecewise constant refractive indices, are demonstrated to make up missing data. The third technique, known as the phase space tomography (PST), addresses the correlation function recovery problem. Implementing the PST involves measuring many intensity images under spatial propagation. Experimental demonstration of a compressive reconstruction method, which finds the sparse solution by decomposing the correlation function into a few mutually uncorrelated coherent modes, is presented to produce accurate reconstruction even when the measurement suers from the 'missing cone' problem in the Fourier domain.