Fig. 1.

Comparison between (a) the regular coherent microscope platform and (b) the proposed PSM concept. In the PSM approach, we use a thin diffuser to modulate the light waves from the object. The diffuser is then scanned to different lateral positions, and the captured images are used to recover the super-resolution exit wavefront of the object and the diffuser profile. With the recovered exit wavefront, we can digitally propagate it to different z positions to get the object images. The final achievable resolution is limited by the smallest feature size of the diffuser, which modulates the otherwise inaccessible object information into the passband of the objective.