Three-dimensional (3D) quantitative imaging of micro- and macro-structures and their dynamics could find numerous applications in many fields such as 3D metrology, pre- and post-production control, object recognition, cell biology and medicine, just to cite a few. Inside of our group, we are interested in the development of new methods for quantitative phase and 3D imaging mainly focused to the fields of microscopy (quantitative phase imaging) and 3D mapping by remote sensing.

Quantitative phase imaging in microscopy deals with the capability of phase retrieval by using interferometric or non-interferometric approaches. Since the phase distribution transmitted by a sample contains information of both the surface profile as well as the internal distribution of the sample (changes in the refractive index values), phase retrieval provides extremely useful information of the sample under test. We have validated different holographic configurations adapted to regular microscope embodiments to upgrade it with coherence sensing capabilities for a wide range of different samples.

And 3D mapping and range measurement deals with the analysis of objects in the far field and permits 3D representation and object recognition based on the retrieved 3D information. One of these concepts was the background technology for the first version of the Microsoft Kinect sensor.