The success of ptychographic imaging experiments strongly depends on
achieving high signal-to-noise ratio. This is particularly important in
nanoscale imaging experiments when diffraction signals are very weak and the
experiments are accompanied by significant parasitic scattering (background),
outliers or correlated noise sources. It is also critical when rare events such
as cosmic rays, or bad frames caused by electronic glitches or shutter timing
malfunction take place.
In this paper, we propose a novel iterative algorithm with rigorous analysis
that exploits the direct forward model for parasitic noise and sample
smoothness to achieve a thorough characterization and removal of structured and
random noise. We present a formal description of the proposed algorithm and
prove its convergence under mild conditions. Numerical experiments from
simulations and real data (both soft and hard X-ray beamlines) demonstrate that
the proposed algorithms produce better results when compared to
state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure