In this dissertation we address the problem of estimating the phase from colorimages acquired with differential–interference–contrast (DIC) microscopy. This technique has been widely recognized for producing high contrast images at high lateral resolution. One of its disadvant ages is that the observed images cannot be easily used for topographical and morphological interpretation, because the changes in phase of the light, produced by variations in the refractive index of the object, are hidden in the intensity image. We present an image formation model for polychromatic light, along with a detailed description of the point spread function (PSF). As for the phase recovery problem, we followed the inverse problem approach by means of minimizing a non-linear least–squares (LS)–like discrepancy term with an edge–preserving regularizing term, given by either the hypersurface (HS) potential or the total variation (TV) one. We investigate the analytical properties of the resulting objective non-convex functions, prove the existence of minimizers and propose a compact formulation of the gradient allowing fast computations. Then we use recent effective optimization tools able to obtain in both the smooth and the non-smooth cases accurate reconstructions with a reduced computational demand. We performed different numerical tests on synthetic realistic images and we compared the proposed methods with both the original conjugate gradient method proposed in the literature, exploiting a gradient–free linesearch for the computation of the steplength parameter, and other standard conjugate gradient approaches.