The theory of operation of a coherent microscope based on synthetic aperture imaging concepts is described. It is a holographic approach that consists of sensing the 3D Fourier transform components of an object in time sequence and reconstructing the image by inverse transforming these components. The process results in complex-valued images in either two or three dimensions. The synthetic aperture microscope sensing method is to construct a synthetic lens composed of a multiplicity of optical plane wave transmitter and receiver pairs. Each of the pairs senses a diffraction grating in the object defined by a Bragg scattering condition. By using array transmitters and receivers, parallelism can be introduced that provides greater sensing speed. Because the data from the synthetic aperture microscope is digitally recorded, it is easy to correct for systematic phase errors in the sensing and to implement common image processing and rendering algorithms.
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