Lensless coherent imaging by phase retrieval with an illumination pattern constraint

It is often possible to reduce the requirements on an imaging system by placing greater demands either on an illumination system or on post-detection processing of the data collected by the system. An extreme example of this is a system with no receiver optics whatsoever. By illuminating an object or scene with coherent light having a shaped illumination pattern, the receiver can be a simple detector array with no imaging optics, detecting the speckle intensity pattern reflected from the object; an image of the object can be reconstructed by a phase retrieval algorithm.