High-speed ptychographic imaging based on multiple-beam illumination

Ptychography is a lensless phase imaging technique that obtains an image by scanning a specimen at several points with respect to a localized illumination beam. For larger specimens, it takes a longer time to complete scanning and hence higher stability is required in the setup which is often not guaranteed. An alternative technique is proposed here that reduces the sequential scanning time for such applications. A pinhole array is used to generate multiple tiny spatially separated beams to scan an object simultaneously at various points. The resulting diffraction patterns are recorded and processed in the Fresnel regime to obtain the images. Unlike other ptychographic methods using multiple beams, the proposed method does not require the use of a multimode ptychography algorithm or autocorrelation filtering of the diffraction patterns. The effectiveness of the method is studied through simulations and experiments. In contrast to conventional single-beam ptychography, the proposed method has the ability to achieve a larger field of view while leaving the number of scanned positions unchanged.