Total Variation-Based Phase Retrieval for Poisson Noise Removal

Phase retrieval plays an important role in vast industrial and scientific applications. We consider a noisy phase retrieval problem in which the magnitudes of the Fourier transform (or a general linear transform) of an underling object are corrupted by Poisson noise, since any optical sensors detect photons, and the number of detected photons follows the Poisson distribution. We propose a variational model for phase retrieval based on a total variation regularization as an image prior and maximum a posteriori estimation of a Poisson noise model, which is referred to as “TV-PoiPR”. We also propose an efficient numerical algorithm based on an alternating direction method of multipliers and establish its convergence. Extensive experiments for coded diffraction, holographic, and ptychographic patterns are conducted using both real- and complex-valued images to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.