Looking through diffusers by phase correction with lensless digital holography

Abstract

Optical imaging through diffusive or scattering media has attracted a great deal of attention. Lensless digital holography is used to reconstruct the intensity and phase of an object located behind a diffuser. For this study, we propose a method of reconstructing the object's intensity by compensating the complex amplitude of the diffuser by lensless digital holography. A priori information is necessary to obtain the complex amplitude of the diffuser, and we investigated the image quality of reconstructed images through diffusers. Our method does not use approximations to describe the propagation of the object light and the wavefronts disturbed by diffusers, and thus provides a more rigorous description of lightwave propagation. The image quality of the reconstructed images was dependent on the distance between the diffuser and the image sensor or between the diffuser and the sample. We investigated the image contrast of reconstructed images under different conditions.