The diffraction limit is only valid in the far field as it assumes that no evanescent fields reach the detector. Various near-field techniques that operate less than ≈1 wavelength of light away from the image plane can obtain substantially higher resolution. These techniques exploit the fact that the evanescent field contains information beyond the diffraction limit which can be used to construct very high resolution images, in principle beating the diffraction limit by a factor proportional to how well a specific imaging system can detect the near-field signal. For scattered light imaging, instruments such as near-field scanning optical microscopes and Nano-FTIR, which are built atop atomic force microscope systems, can be utilized to achieve up to 10-50nm resolution. The data recorded by such instruments often requires substantial processing, essentially solving an optical inverse problem for each image.