Imaging correlography using ptychography

Abstract

Imaging correlography, an effective method for long-distance imaging, recovers an object using only the knowledge of the Fourier modulus, without needing phase information. It is not sensitive to atmospheric turbulence or optical imperfections. However, the unreliability of traditional phase retrieval algorithms in imaging correlography has hindered their development. In this work, we join imaging correlography and ptychography together to overcome such obstacles. Instead of detecting the whole object, the object is measured part-by-part with a probe moving in a ptychographic way. A flexible optimization framework is proposed to reconstruct the object rapidly and reliably within a few iterations. In addition, novel image space denoising regularization is plugged into the loss function to reduce the effects of input noise and improve the perceptual quality of the recovered image. Experiments demonstrate that four-fold resolution gains are achievable for the proposed imaging method. We can obtain satisfactory results for both visual and quantitative metrics with one-sixth of the measurements in the conventional imaging correlography. Therefore, the proposed imaging technique is more suitable for long-range practical applications.