Geometric super-resolved imaging based upon axial scanning and phase retrieval

In this paper, we propose a new geometric super-resolving approach that overcomes the geometric resolution reduction caused by the spatially large pixels of the detector array. The improvement process is obtained by applying an axial scanning procedure. In the scanning process, several images are captured corresponding to focus applied at several axial planes. By applying an iterative Gerchberg-Saxton-based algorithm, we managed to retrieve the phase and to reconstruct the original high-resolution image from the captured set of low-resolution images. In addition, the paper also presents a numerically efficient algorithm to compute the free space Fresnel integral. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America