Effect of spatial distribution of partial information on the accurate recovery of optical wave fields

We consider the problem of recovering a signal from partial and redundant information distributed over two fractional Fourier domains. This corresponds to recovering a wave field from two planes perpendicular to the direction of propagation in a quadratic-phase multilens system. The distribution of the known information over the two planes has a significant effect on our ability to accurately recover the field. We observe that distributing the known samples more equally between the two planes, or increasing the distance between the planes in free space, generally makes the recovery more difficult. Spreading the known information uniformly over the planes, or acquiring additional samples to compensate for the redundant information, helps to improve the accuracy of the recovery. These results shed light onto redundancy and information relations among the given data for a broad class of systems of practical interest, and provide a deeper insight into the underlying mathematical problem. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America