Abstract

Using photosensitive recording materials to record holograms¹ is costly and inflexible. Digital holography²’³, (DH) refers to the science of using discrete electronic devices, such as CCDs to record the hologram. In this case reconstruction is performed numerically by simulating the propagation of the wavefield back to the plane of the object. One major advantage of DH over material holography is the ability to used discrete signal processing (DSP) techniques to the recorded signals. In recent years DH has been demonstrated to be a useful method in many areas of optics such as microscopy, deformation analysis, object contouring, particles sizing and position measurement. ‘In-line’ or ‘on-axis’ DH refers to the implementation of the original Gabor architecture in which the reference wavefield travels in the same direction as the object wavefield. As in the continuous case this method suffers from poor reconstructed image quality, due to the presence of the intensity terms and the conjugate image that contaminates the reconstructed object image. However it is possible to use DSP techniques to minimise this contamination.

© 2007 Optical Society of America