Computational Wide Area Optical Phase Contrast Microscopy

This work focuses on computational imaging techniques aimed at reducing the cumbersomeness and cost of physical optical components. Here we present our preliminary results from a lens free wide area optical microscope. A wide area on-chip microscopy would allow faster and more efficient microscopy of sparse thin samples without the need to scan the sample. Our setup resembles that used in a Gabor Holographic method. The goal of this project is to investigate the effectiveness of a single-stage algorithm to obtain the phase of an image from intensity measurements alone. The technique will include both single and multiple source-to-sample distances in order to generate data to explore previously-established methodologies. We will adapt some popular methods used in x-ray phase retrieval to test our new device. In addition, we will develop theoretical methods and computational algorithms to suit an array of applications.