Abstract

Recent papers have shown that there are different coherent and partially coherent fields that may have identical intensity distributions throughout space. On the other hand, the well-known transport-of-intensity equation allows the phase of a coherent field to be recovered from intensity measurements, and the solution is widely held to be unique. A discussion is given on the recovery of the structure of both coherent and partially coherent fields from intensity measurements, and we reconcile the uniqueness question by showing that the transport-of-intensity equation has a unique solution for the phase only if the intensity distribution has no zeros.

© 1995 Optical Society of America

Full Article  |  PDF Article
OSA Recommended Articles
Geometrical optics and optimal transport

Jacob Rubinstein and Gershon Wolansky
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 34(10) 1817-1823 (2017)

Phase discrepancy analysis and compensation for fast Fourier transform based solution of the transport of intensity equation

Chao Zuo, Qian Chen, Lei Huang, and Anand Asundi
Opt. Express 22(14) 17172-17186 (2014)

Boundary-artifact-free phase retrieval with the transport of intensity equation: fast solution with use of discrete cosine transform

Chao Zuo, Qian Chen, and Anand Asundi
Opt. Express 22(8) 9220-9244 (2014)

More Recommended Articles

References

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Citation lists with outbound citation links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access OSA Member Subscription

Cited By

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access OSA Member Subscription

Figures (3)

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Figure files are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access OSA Member Subscription

Equations (38)

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Equations are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access OSA Member Subscription

Metrics

You do not have subscription access to this journal. Article level metrics are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an OSA member, or as an authorized user of your institution.

Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access OSA Member Subscription