Patent ID: 8040595

Claim:
A method for reconstructing a wave, comprising the steps of: illuminating a specimen at an output plane to provide an output wave comprising specimen information, the output plane including a null region in which the output wave has a value of zero; applying a number N of different phase filters of known phase shift to the output wave at or near the output plane to create N phase-shifted waves each having a phase shift that corresponds to a respective phase filter; measuring at a diffraction plane only a portion of the amplitude distribution for each of N diffraction patterns to provide measured and unmeasured portions of the amplitude distributions of the diffraction patterns, each diffraction pattern corresponding to a respective one of the phase-shifted waves; inverse Fourier-transforming each of the measured portions of the amplitude distributions of the diffraction patterns to produce a respective computed estimate of the phase-shifted wave at the output plane, the computed estimates comprising both amplitude and phase information; applying a respective inverse phase filter to each of the computed estimates of the phase-shifted waves to remove the phase-shift introduced by the corresponding phase filter to provide computed estimates of non-phase-shifted waves at the output plane; correcting the computed estimates of the non-phase-shifted waves by setting the values of the amplitude and phase to zero for those portions of the computed estimates of the non-phase-shifted waves which correspond to the null region of the output plane to provide a plurality of corrected estimates; and recovering the amplitude and phase in the diffraction plane of the unmeasured portion of the amplitude distributions of the diffraction patterns based on the corrected estimates, whereby the amplitude and phase information of the unmeasured portion is recovered to achieve super-resolution.