Optical eigenmode imaging

Abstract

We present an indirect imaging method that measures both amplitude and phase information from a transmissive target. Our method is based on an optical eigenmode decomposition of the light intensity and the first-order cross correlation between a target field and these eigenmodes. We demonstrate that such optical eigenmode imaging does not need any a priori knowledge of the imaging system and corresponds to a compressive full-field sampling leading to high image extraction efficiencies. Finally, we discuss the implications with respect to second-order correlation imaging.