Conventional tomographic techniques are becoming increasingly infeasible for reconstructing the operators of quantum devices of growing sophistication. We describe a novel tomographic procedure using coherent states, which begins by reconstructing the diagonals of the operator and then each successive off- diagonal in a recursive manner. Each recursion is considerably more efficient than reconstructing the operator in its entirety, and each successive recursion involves fewer parameters. We apply our technique to reconstruct the positive-operator-valued measure corresponding to a recently developed coherent optical detector with phase sensitivity and number resolution. We discuss the effect of various parameters on the reconstruction accuracy. The results show the efficiency of the method and its robustness to experimental noise.
