Toward Fast and Provably Accurate Near-field Ptychographic Phase Retrieval

Abstract: Ptychography is an imaging technique which involves a sample being illuminated by a coherent, localized probe of illumination. When the probe interacts with the sample, the light is diffracted and a diffraction pattern is detected. Then the sample (or probe) is shifted laterally in space to illuminate a new area of the sample whilst ensuring sufficient overlap. Near-field Ptychography (NFP) occurs when the sample is placed at a short defocus distance having a large Fresnel number. In this paper, we prove that certain NFP measurements are robustly invertible (up to an unavoidable global phase ambiguity) by constructing a point spread function and physical mask which leads to a well-conditioned lifted linear system. We then apply a block phase retrieval algorithm using weighted angular synchronization and prove that the proposed approach accurately recovers the measured sample. Finally, we also propose using a Wirtinger Flow for NFP problems and numerically evaluate that alternate approach both against our main proposed approach, as well as with NFP measurements for which our main approach does not apply.