SAVI: Synthetic apertures for long-range, subdiffraction-limited visible imaging using Fourier ptychography.

Abstract

Synthetic aperture radar is a well-known technique for improving resolution in radio imaging. Extending these synthetic aperture techniques to the visible light domain is not straightforward because optical receivers cannot measure phase information. We propose to use macroscopic Fourier ptychography (FP) as a practical means of creating a synthetic aperture for visible imaging to achieve subdiffraction-limited resolution. We demonstrate the first working prototype for macroscopic FP in a reflection imaging geometry that is capable of imaging optically rough objects. In addition, a novel image space denoising regularization is introduced during phase retrieval to reduce the effects of speckle and improve perceptual quality of the recovered high-resolution image. Our approach is validated experimentally where the resolution of various diffuse objects is improved sixfold.