Imaging on the surfaces of an uneven thickness medium based on hybrid phase retrieval with the assistance of off-axis digital holography

A hybrid phase retrieval method with the assistance of off-axis digital holography is proposed for imaging objects on the surfaces of a transparent medium with uneven thickness. The approximate phase distribution is obtained by a constrained optimization approach from the off-axis hologram, and it is used in an iterative procedure for retrieving the complex field of the object from the Gabor hologram. Furthermore, principal component analysis is introduced for compensating for phase aberrations caused by the medium. Numerical simulations and optical experiments were carried out to validate the proposed method. The quality of the reconstructed image is improved remarkably compared to only off-axis digital holography.