  This article presents a thorough comparison of themain QPM techniques,
focusing on their accuracy in terms of measurement precision and trueness. We
focus on 8 techniques, namely digital holographic microscopy (DHM),
cross-grating wavefront microscopy (CGM), which is based on QLSI (quadriwave
lateral shearing interferometry), diffraction phase microscopy (DPM),
differential phase-contrast (DPC) microscopy, phase-shifting interferometry
(PSI) imaging, Fourier phase microscopy (FPM), spatial light interference
microscopy (SLIM), and transport-of-intensity equation (TIE) imaging. For this
purpose, we used a home-made numerical toolbox based on discrete dipole
approximation (IF-DDA). This toolbox is designed to compute the electromagnetic
field at the sample plane of a microscope, irrespective of the object's
complexity or the illumination conditions. We upgraded this toolbox to enable
it to model any type of QPM, and to take into account shot noise. In a
nutshell, the results show that DHM and PSI are inherently free from artefacts
and rather suffer from coherent noise; In CGM, DPC, DPM and TIE, there is a
trade off between precision and trueness, which can be balanced by varying one
experimental parameter; FPM and SLIM suffer from inherent artefacts that cannot
be discarded experimentally in most cases, making the techniques not
quantitative especially for large objects covering a large part of the field of
view, such as eukaryotic cells.
