Abstract:We propose an alternative method for solving the Transport of Intensity equation (TIE) from a stack of through-focus intensity images taken by a microscope or lensless imager. Our method enables quantitative phase and amplitude imaging with improved accuracy and reduced data capture, while also being computationally efficient and robust to noise. We use prior knowledge of how intensity varies with propagation in the spatial frequency domain in order to constrain a fitting algorithm [Gaussian process (GP) regression] for estimating the axial intensity derivative. Solving the problem in the frequency domain inspires an efficient measurement scheme which captures images at exponentially spaced focal steps, significantly reducing the number of images required. Low-frequency artifacts that plague traditional TIE methods can be suppressed without an excessive number of captured images. We validate our technique experimentally by recovering the phase of human cheek cells in a brightfield microscope.

We present a general algorithm for combining measurements taken under various illumination and imaging conditions to quantitatively extract the amplitude and phase of an object wave. The algorithm uses the weak object transfer function, which incorporates arbitrary pupil functions and partially coherent illumination. The approach is extended beyond the weak object regime using an iterative algorithm. We demonstrate the method on measurements of Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) multilayer mask defects taken in an EUV zone plate microscope with both a standard zone plate lens and a zone plate implementing Zernike phase contrast. Am. 73, 1434Am. 73, (1983. 5. J. R. Fienup, "Phase retrieval algorithms: a comparison," Appl. Opt. 21, 2758Opt. 21, -2769Opt. 21, (1982. 217, 408-432 (1953). 32. C. Chang, A. Sakdinawat, P. Fischer, E. Anderson, and D. Attwood, "Single-element objective lens for soft x-ray differential interference contrast microscopy," Opt. Lett. 31, 1564Lett. 31, -1566Lett. 31, (2006. 33. F. Zernike, "Phase contrast, a new method for the microscopic observation of transparent objects," Physica 9, 686-698 (1942

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We demonstrate a Kalman filtering method to recover the phase of a thin object illuminated by partially coherent light. Our method is fast, efficient, robust to noise, and able to handle arbitrary source shapes when used in a microscope with Köhler illumination.

Video streaming usage has seen a significant rise as entertainment, education, and business increasingly rely on online video. Optimizing video compression has the potential to increase access and quality of content to users, and reduce energy use and costs overall. In this paper, we present an application of the MuZero algorithm to the challenge of video compression. Specifically, we target the problem of learning a rate control policy to select the quantization parameters (QP) in the encoding process of libvpx, an open source VP9 video compression library widely used by popular video-on-demand (VOD) services. We treat this as a sequential decision making problem to maximize the video quality with an episodic constraint imposed by the target bitrate. Notably, we introduce a novel self-competition based reward mechanism to solve constrained RL with variable constraint satisfaction difficulty, which is challenging for existing constrained RL methods. We demonstrate that the MuZero-based rate control achieves an average 6.28% reduction in size of the compressed videos for the same delivered video quality level (measured as PSNR BD-rate) compared to libvpx's two-pass VBR rate control policy, while having better constraint satisfaction behavior.