  In cold atom experiments, each image of light refracted and absorbed by an
atomic ensemble carries a remarkable amount of information. Numerous imaging
techniques including absorption, fluorescence, and phase-contrast are commonly
used. Other techniques such as off-resonance defocused imaging (ORDI), where an
in-focus image is deconvolved from a defocused image, have been demonstrated
but find only niche applications. The ORDI inversion process introduces
systematic artifacts because it relies on regularization to account for missing
information at some spatial frequencies. In the present work, we extend ORDI to
use multiple cameras simultaneously at degrees of defocus, eliminating the need
for regularization and its attendant artifacts. We demonstrate this technique
by imaging Bose-Einstein condensates, and show that the statistical
uncertainties in the measured column density using the multiple-camera
off-resonance defocused (MORD) imaging method are competitive with absorption
imaging near resonance and phase contrast imaging far from resonance.
Experimentally, the MORD method may be incorporated into existing set-ups with
minimal additional equipment.
