Ptychography Using Blind Multi-Mode PMACE

Abstract

Ptychography is an imaging technique that enables nanometer-scale reconstruction of complex transmittance images by scanning objects with overlapping X-ray illumination patterns. However, the illumination function is typically unknown and only partially coherent, which presents challenges for reconstruction. In this paper, we introduce Blind Multi-Mode Projected Multi-Agent Consensus Equilibrium (BM-PMACE) for blind ptychographic reconstruction. BM-PMACE jointly estimates both the complex transmittance image and the multi-modal probe functions associated with a partially coherent probe source. Importantly, BM-PMACE maintains a location-specific probe state that captures spatially varying probe aberrations. Our method also incorporates a dynamic strategy for integrating additional probe modes. Our experiments on synthetic and measured data demonstrate that BM-PMACE outperforms existing approaches in reconstruction quality and convergence rate.