Phase retrieval from power spectra of masked signals

In diffraction imaging, one is tasked with reconstructing a signal from its power spectrum. To resolve the ambiguity in this inverse problem, one might invoke prior knowledge about the signal, but phase retrieval algorithms in this vein have found limited success. One alternative is to create redundancy in the measurement process by illuminating the signal multiple times, distorting the signal each time with a different mask. Despite several recent advances in phase retrieval, the community has yet to construct an ensemble of masks which uniquely determines all signals and admits an efficient reconstruction algorithm. In this paper, we leverage the recently proposed polarization method to construct such an ensemble. We also present numerical simulations to illustrate the stability of the polarization method in this setting. In comparison to a state-of-the-art phase retrieval algorithm known as PhaseLift, we find that polarization is much faster with comparable stability.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure

PhasePack: A Phase Retrieval Library

Phase retrieval deals with the estimation of complex-valued signals solely from the magnitudes of linear measurements. While there has been a recent explosion in the development of phase retrieval algorithms, the lack of a common interface has made it difficult to compare new methods against the state-of-the-art. The purpose of PhasePack is to create a common software interface for a wide range of phase retrieval algorithms and to provide a common testbed using both synthetic data and empirical imaging datasets. PhasePack is able to benchmark a large number of recent phase retrieval methods against one another to generate comparisons using a range of different performance metrics. The software package handles single method testing as well as multiple method comparisons. The algorithm implementations in PhasePack differ slightly from their original descriptions in the literature in order to achieve faster speed and improved robustness. In particular, PhasePack uses adaptive stepsizes, line-search methods, and fast eigensolvers to speed up and automate convergence

Spectral pre-modulation of training examples enhances the spatial resolution of the Phase Extraction Neural Network (PhENN)

The Phase Extraction Neural Network (PhENN) is a computational architecture, based on deep machine learning, for lens-less quantitative phase retrieval from raw intensity data. PhENN is a deep convolutional neural network trained through examples consisting of pairs of true phase objects and their corresponding intensity diffraction patterns; thereafter, given a test raw intensity pattern PhENN is capable of reconstructing the original phase object robustly, in many cases even for objects outside the database where the training examples were drawn from. Here, we show that the spatial frequency content of the training examples is an important factor limiting PhENN's spatial frequency response. For example, if the training database is relatively sparse in high spatial frequencies, as most natural scenes are, PhENN's ability to resolve fine spatial features in test patterns will be correspondingly limited. To combat this issue, we propose "flattening" the power spectral density of the training examples before presenting them to PhENN. For phase objects following the statistics of natural scenes, we demonstrate experimentally that the spectral pre-modulation method enhances the spatial resolution of PhENN by a factor of 2.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Illumination strategies for intensity-only imaging

We propose a new strategy for narrow band, active array imaging of localized scat- terers when only the intensities are recorded and measured at the array. We consider a homogeneous medium so that wave propagation is fully coherent. We show that imaging with intensity-only measurements can be carried out using the time reversal operator of the imaging system, which can be obtained from intensity measurements using an appropriate illumination strategy and the polarization identity. Once the time reversal operator has been obtained, we show that the images can be formed using its singular value decomposition (SVD). We use two SVD-based methods to image the scatterers. The proposed approach is simple and efficient. It does not need prior information about the sought image, and guarantees exact recovery in the noise-free case. Furthermore, it is robust with respect to additive noise. Detailed numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed imaging strategy when only the intensities are captured