Coherent modulation imaging of high signal-to-noise ratio and high reconstruction speed

Coherent modulation imaging (CMI) has become an effective tool for simultaneously detecting the modulus and phase of complex light fields. However, previously reported CMI methods suffered from low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) and low convergence speeds. In this study, we propose a modified CMI method with high SNR and fast reconstruction speed. Both phase plate and diffraction patterns were split into nine units and then taken into reconstruction in 81 different combinations to suppress reconstruction noise. At the same time, since parallel reconstructions were carried out with these split units of reduced data volume, the reconstruction time was compressed from 40s to 2s. Experimental results suggest that this proposed method can make CMI more powerful for detecting laser beams, mechanical deformations, and biological samples.