Abstract
Phase imaging techniques extract the optical path-length information of a scene, whereas wavefront sensors provide the shape of an optical wavefront. Since these two applications have different technical requirements, they have developed their own specific technology. Here we show how to perform phase imaging combining wavefront sampling using a reconfigurable spatial light modulator with a beam position detector. The result is a time-multiplexed detection scheme, capable of being shortened considerably by compressive sensing. This robust reference-less method does not require the phase unwrapping algorithms demanded by conventional interferometry, and its lenslet-free nature removes tradeoffs usually found in Shack-Hartmann sensors.
Highlights
Even though the physical nature of light has been fully understood for more than a century, there are still no available detectors capable of directly imaging both the amplitude and phase information of a wavefront (Fig. 1a)
Gabor suggested in 1949 the first quantitative technique, which used interferometric information to recover the complex optical field [6], stablishing the basis of modern holography and paving the way for applications such as quantitative phase microscopy [7]
Adaptive optics was initially conceived for circumventing atmospheric turbulences in Astronomy, its simple operation principle has found applications in other areas, such as visual optics [3,4], microscopy [9,10], and biomedical imaging [11,12]
Summary
Even though the physical nature of light has been fully understood for more than a century, there are still no available detectors capable of directly imaging both the amplitude and phase information of a wavefront (Fig. 1a) Information about those two quantities is of capital interest when trying to perform biomedical imaging [1,2], aberration measurement and correction in visual optics [3,4], and threedimensional imaging [5], among other applications. A second group of techniques has emerged, whose objective is to recover the same information without the need of a reference beam These noninterferometric approaches rely on several assumptions about the object beam, and use mathematical algorithms to infer the wavefront information [13]. The corresponding results are compared, respectively, with Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing and phase-shifting interferometry
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