Fresnel Coherent Diffraction Imaging Without Wavefront Priors

Abstract

Fresnel diffraction plays a critical role in coherent diffraction imaging and holography. Experimental setups for these techniques are often designed based on plane-wave illumination. However, two key issues arise in practical applications: on the one hand, it is difficult to obtain an ideal plane wave in experiments, which inevitably introduces wavefront curvature; on the other hand, the use of spherical waves enhances the quality of reconstruction results, while it also imposes additional requirements for the calibration of both the illumination wavefront and experimental parameters. To address these issues, we introduce a diffraction-adapted propagation model that integrates both the spherical wavefront effects and sampling variations within the diffraction model. The parameters of this model can be estimated through prior-free optimization, thereby eliminating the need for prior knowledge of system parameters or specific experimental setups. Our approach enables robust reconstruction across a wide range of Fresnel diffraction patterns. It also allows for the automatic calibration of experimental parameters using only the measured data. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated through both theoretical analysis and experimental results.