Coded aperture pair for quantitative phase imaging

This Letter proposes a novel quantitative phase-imaging approach by optically encoding light fields into a complementary image pair followed by computational reconstruction. We demonstrate that the axial intensity derivative for phase recovery can be well estimated by a coded-aperture image pair without z axial scanning. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve higher accuracy and robustness compared with conventional transport-of-intensity equation (TIE) based approaches under partial coherence illumination.