Light-field-based phase imaging

Phase contains important information about the diffraction or scattering property of an object, and therefore the imaging of phase is vital to many applications including biomedicine and metrology, just name a few. However, due to the limited bandwidth of image sensors, it is not possible to directly detect the phase of an optical field. Many methods including the Transport of Intensity Equation (TIE) have been well demonstrated for quantitative and non-interferometric imaging of phase. The TIE offers an experimentally simple technique for computing phase quantitatively from two or more defocused images. Usually, the defocused images were experimentally obtained by shifting the camera along the optical axis with slight intervals. Note that light field imaging has the capability to take an image stack focused at different depths by digital refocusing the captured light field of a scene. In this paper, we propose to combine Light Field Microscopy and the TIE method for phase imaging, taking the digital-refocusing advantage of Light Field Microscopy. We demonstrate the propose technique by simulation results. Compare with the traditional camera-shifting technique, light-field imaging allows the capturing the defocused images without any mechanical instability and therefore demonstrate advantage in practical applications.