Computational adaptive optics for interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy and other interferometric imaging

Methods for correcting for aberrations in the image or three-dimensional reconstruction of a sampled region obtained by broadband interferometry. The sampled region is illuminated with a broadband beam of light, and light returned from the sample is detected, along with a reference beam, in order to derive an interference signal for pixels of a volume spanned by wavenumber and axes transverse to the beam propagation direction. An optimization procedure is performed with respect to a specified criterion so as to obtain an aberration-corrected image of at least one plane of the sampled region, either in a plane-specific manner or in a space-invariant manner throughout the sampled region. A filter function, which may be derived from the interference signal attendant to irradiating a sparsely distributed plurality of point scatterers, or otherwise, corrects for a detected aberrated point spread function. Methods of the present invention may be used for aberration correction in reading information from an optical data storage medium.