Quantitative imaging from diffracted fields intensities: an inversion method and its experimental validation

In many diagnostics and imaging applications intensity only measurements of the diffracted field are available. Hence, it is of interest to develop procedures able to solve the underlying inverse scattering problem under these conditions. In this paper, we introduce an approach in which the geometrical and electromagnetic properties of unknown complex targets are reconstructed from the squared amplitudes of the diffracted fields. The approach relies on some preliminary considerations on the spatial bandwidth of the diffracted intensities which allow one to fix rules to effectively measure the data and on an alternative formulation of the electromagnetic scattering that lowers the 'degree of non-linearity' of the relationship among the electric features of the targets and the fields. The proposed procedure is tested against benchmark experimental data in the microwave frequency range and the obtained results confirm the possibility of achieving faithful quantitative images of unknown targets from phaseless data without making approximations in the inverse scattering problem.