IATIA Ltd
is a developer of digital wavefront imaging solutions for visualisation and measurement, enabling unprecedented depth and clarity of hard-to-see objects from transparent biological cells, optics of the human eye to hidden and camouflaged objects in military and security operations. The technology is based on a patented algorithm that was developed by Prof Keith Nugent and his team, for which they also received the rarely held R&D 100 awards in 1988 and 2002.
The QPI algorithm enables the extraction of phase information from incoherent, polychromatic radiation without requiring special optical components. The algorithm can recover phase information from just two conventional brightfield images taken at slightly different focal planes.
The algorithm has a number of key advantages, including:
- returns phase and intensity information independently
- provides quantitative, absolute phase (with DC offset)
- is a rapid, stable, non-iterative solution
- works with non-uniform and partially coherent illumination
- offers relaxed beam conditioning
- solves the twin image problem of holography
- has been experimentally applied to a number of radiations