Optical Tomographic Image Reconstruction Based on Beam Propagation and Sparse Regularization

Optical tomographic imaging requires an accurate forward model as well as regularization to mitigate missing-data artifacts and to suppress noise. Nonlinear forward models can provide more accurate interpretation of the measured data than their linear counterparts, but they generally result in computationally prohibitive reconstruction algorithms. Although sparsity-driven regularizers significantly improve the quality of reconstructed image, they further increase the computational burden of imaging. In this paper, we present a novel iterative imaging method for optical tomography that combines a nonlinear forward model based on the beam propagation method (BPM) with an edge-preserving three-dimensional (3-D) total variation (TV) regularizer. The central element of our approach is a time-reversal scheme, which allows for an efficient computation of the derivative of the transmitted wave-field with respect to the distribution of the refractive index. This time-reversal scheme together with our stochastic proximal-gradient algorithm makes it possible to optimize under a nonlinear forward model in a computationally tractable way, thus enabling a high-quality imaging of the refractive index throughout the object. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through several experiments on simulated and experimentally measured data.