Exact reconstruction in Quantitative Phase Microscopy

We address the problem of phase reconstruction in Quantitative Phase Microscopy (QPM). We develop sufficient conditions on the interfering reference wave for exact phase reconstruction in the absence of noise and propose a noniterative phase reconstruction technique. We show that the zero-order artifact, a commonly encountered problem in QPM, can be completely suppressed by the proposed reconstruction technique. The theoretical guarantees pertain to continuous-domain object functions with the additional assumption of being bandlimited. We present results on synthesized phase objects that are effectively bandlimited to show that the proposed method is capable of recovering the phase acurately. In cases of images where the phase exhibits large excursions, unwrapping becomes necessary, for which we employ Goldstein´s phase unwrapping algorithm.