Complex-valued acquisition of the diffraction imaging by incoherent quasimonochromatic light without a support constraint

A scheme for complex-valued acquisition of the diffraction imaging with quasimonochromatic incoherent light is theoretically proposed. The main idea is to project the real and the imaginary parts of a Fraunhofer diffraction field on intensity distributions, respectively, with the use of a {pi}/2 phase-changing plate. The whole procedure is iterative algorithm free and needs no a priori knowledge of an arbitrary object. A numerical experiment and a quantitative confirmation are also given. To our knowledge, it was the first physical proposal for the complex-valued acquisition of a diffraction imaging by two-dimensional coherent patterns with thermal illumination.