Suppressing the Zero-Frequency Components in Single Quantitative Phase Imaging by Filtering the Low-Frequency Intrinsic Mode Function Components

Abstract

In off-axis quantitative phase imaging, existing methods of suppressing the zero-frequency component (ZFC) always cause the loss of high-frequency phase information, thus degrading the accuracy of phase reconstruction. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes to preserve the high-frequency information by filtering the intrinsic mode function. In this method, empirical mode decomposition is employed to decompose the interferometric image into a series of intrinsic mode function (IMF) components from high to low frequencies. The decomposed low-frequency IMF components are processed by Gaussian high-pass filters for ZFC suppression, and the high-frequency IMF components and the filtered low-frequency IMF components are combined to obtain the reconstructed hologram. Hilbert transform is then performed on the reconstructed hologram to filter out the conjugate image, leaving only the original image. In order to verify the performance of our proposed method, the phase maps processed by our proposed method are compared with those processed by the Fourier filtering method, wavelet transform-based method and Laplace operator method. The experimental results show that the proposed method not only suppresses ZFC but also achieves higher accuracy in phase reconstruction.