Low-cost single-shot complex optical field imaging with a simplified aperture

Abstract

We report a new computational imaging methodology for complex optical field based on a single-frame diffraction intensity pattern acquisition with a simplified aperture and an extremely low-cost industrial machine vision camera. The current design of the apertures for the recovery of complex optical field was suffering from specific coding associated with the use of spatial light modulator or digital micromirror device, where it is difficult to make the optical implementations compact and cost-effective. In this work, we demonstrate that a simplified aperture without any pattern-like coding is efficient to establish the physical constraint for computational reconstruction. The aperture attached to the object defines the imaging region of interest (ROI) with coherent trans-illumination, and only one snapshot of the diffraction intensity pattern is required for recovering the ROI's complex field. Proof-of-concept numerical simulations and optical experiments have been carried out to validate the feasibility, noise robustness, resolution, and potential biological imaging applications of the proposed computational method.