Simulated Annealing Applied to HIO Method for Phase Retrieval

Phase retrieval utilizing Fourier amplitudes plays a significant role in image recovery. Iterative phase retrieval algorithms have been developed to retrieve phase information that cannot be recorded by detectors directly. However, iterative algorithms face the problem of being trapped in local minima due to the nonconvexity of phase retrieval, and most existing works addressed this by optimizing in multiple runs parallelly to improve the possibility that one of these could reach the global minimum. Alternatively, we propose in this work to increase the probability of reaching the global minimum with one arbitrary initial distribution by adapting simulated annealing in the standard hybrid input-output (HIO) algorithm. Numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method reconstructs images with mean square errors 50.12% smaller than those reconstructed by HIO. More importantly, the proposed method can be applied to any HIO-based algorithm with multiple runs to further improve the performance.