Simulation study on the quantitative phase retrieval method under two-step phase-shifting technique

Based on two-step phase-shifting technique, we present a new derivative method for phase information extraction in quantitative phase imaging (QPI). By acquiring two phase-shifted interferograms and numerically calculating their 1st order derivatives, one can directly obtain the quantitative phase information. We demonstrate the proposed method by comparing our simulated results with the experimental results of the red blood cell and the HeLa cell, respectively. It shows that our method can be generally applied to any QPI, such as on-axis and off-axis interferometry, especially for slightly off-axis interferometry, and it has the feature of efficient utility of camera spatial bandwidth and the ability of fast data processing.