We develop a means for speckle-based phase imaging of the projected thickness of a single-material object, under the assumption of illumination by spatially random time-independent x-ray speckles. These speckles are generated by passing x rays through a suitable spatially random mask. The method makes use of a single image obtained in the presence of the object, which serves to deform the illuminating speckle field relative to a reference speckle field (which only needs to be measured once) obtained in the presence of the mask and the absence of the object. The method implicitly rather than explicitly tracks speckles and utilizes the transport-of-intensity equation to give a closed-form solution to the inverse problem of determining the complex transmission function of the object. Implementation using x-ray synchrotron data shows the method to be robust and efficient with respect to noise. Applications include x-ray phase-amplitude radiography and tomography, as well as time-dependent imaging of dynamic and radiation-sensitive samples using low-flux sources.

• Received 4 August 2019
• Revised 28 February 2020
• Accepted 1 April 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.13.054023