Abstract: The invention relates to 4F-based optical phase imaging system and in particular to reconstructing quantitative phase information of an object when using such systems. The invention applies a two-dimensional, complex spatial light modulator (SLM) to impress a complex spatial synthesized modulation in addition to the complex spatial modulation impressed by the object. This SLM is arranged so that the synthesized modulation is superimposed with the object modulation and is thus placed at an input plane to the phase imaging system. By evaluating output images from the phase imaging system, the synthesized modulation is selected to optimize parameters in the output image which improves the reconstruction of qualitative and quantitative object phase information from the resulting output images.