Reconstruction of missing information in diffraction patterns and holograms by iterative phase retrieval

It is demonstrated that an object distribution can be successfully retrieved from its diffraction pattern or hologram, even if some of the measured intensity samples are missing. The maximum allowable number of missing values depends on the linear oversampling ratio sigma, where the higher the value of sigma, the more intensity samples can be missing. For a real-valued object, the ratio of missing pixels to the total number of pixels should not exceed (1 - 2/sigma(2)) or (1-1/sigma(2)) in the acquired diffraction pattern or hologram, respectively. For example, even 5% of the measured intensity values at an oversampling ratio of sigma = 8 are sufficient to simultaneously retrieve the object distribution and the missing intensity values. It is important that the missing intensity values should not be concentrated in the centre, but should be randomly distributed over the acquired diffraction pattern.