Patent ID: 6885442

Claim:
A method of quantitative determination of the phase of a radiation wave field including the steps of (a) producing a representative measure of the rate of change of intensity of said radiation wave field over a selected surface extending generally across the wave field; (b) producing a representative measure of intensity of said radiation wave filed over said selected surface; (c) transforming said measure of rate of change of intensity to produce a first integral transform representation and applying to said first integral transform representation a first filter corresponding to the inversion of a first differential operator reflected in said measure of rate of change of intensity to produce a first modified integral transform representation; (d) applying an inverse of said first integral transform to said first modified integral transform representation to produce an untransformed representation; (e) applying a correction based on said measure of intensity over said selected surface to said untransformed representation; (f) transforming the corrected untransformed representation to produce a second integral transform representation and applying to said second integral transform representation a second filter corresponding to the inversion of a second differential operator reflected in the corrected untransformed representation to produce a second modified integral transform representation; (g) applying an inverse of said second integral transform to said second modified integral transform representation to produce a measure of phase of said radiation wave field across said selected plane.