Self-invertion and self- visualization of small-scale objects and structures in phase contrast scheme with an adaptive filter with nonlocal thermal nonlinearity considered. It is shown that despite the nonlocal process inverted image of acceptable quality and high conversion efficiency. It is shown that the dependence of the conversion of the original image in the inverted image depends on the ratio of its size to the size of the illuminating beam. The experimental results are in good agreement with numerical calculations.