PtyLab.jl - Ptychography Reconstruction

Conventional Ptychography is a lensless imaging technique which captures a sequence of light diffraction patterns to solve the optical phase problem. The resulting datasets are large and can typically not directly be solved. Instead, iterative reconstruction algorithms with low runtime memory footprint are employed. Here we present PtyLab.jl, a software for ptychographic data analysis and demonstrate how a functional programming style in Julia allows for performant iterative algorithms.

Conventional Ptychography is a powerful technique since it can retrieve phase and amplitude of an object which is usually not accessible by most common imaging techniques. The drawback of this method is that it requires a stack of images taken at different displacements of an object with respect to a probe laser beam (such as a Gaussian laser beam). The recorded images are the intensity of the diffraction pattern of the object illuminated with the probe. Via iterative reconstruction algorithms one can retrieve amplitude and phase of both the probe and the object. To achieve reasonable runtimes, the algorithms require low memory consumption. In PtyLab.jl we achieve that with a functional style of programming where buffers are implicitly stored at the beginning of the reconstruction in different functions. Furthermore, we could demonstrate that this style combined with Julia could achieve reasonable speed-ups in comparison to Matlab and Python.