Investigation of diffraction tomography using intensity measurements

Abstract

Diffraction tomography (DT) is a well-known method for reconstructing the internal structure of weakly scattering objects, and can be viewed as a generalization of conventional X-ray computed tomography (CT) that includes first-order wavefield scattering effects. Conventional DT reconstruction theory requires knowledge of the complex amplitude (i.e., amplitude and phase) of the measured wavefield data in order to accurately reconstruct the generally complex-valued object function that describes the refractive index distribution of the object. This characteristic of DT has hindered its application to high-frequency applications involving coherent optical or X-ray radiation sources, where the direct measurement of the wavefield phase is not performed easily. Recently, Gbur and Wolf have developed [1] an intensity DT (I-DT) reconstruction theory that can reconstruct the complex-valued object function from knowledge of the intensity of the wavefields that are measured on at least two different transverse planes (for each tomographic view angle). In this talk, we report on the theoretical investigation of the statistical properties and numerical implementation of the proposed reconstruction approach. In addition, this will be the first reported application of the algorithm to reconstruct images of non-symmetric multidimensional scattering objects from simulated wavefield data.