Coherence properties of different light sources and their effect on the image sharpness and speckle of holographic displays

Yuanbo Deng,Daping Chu

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-06215-x

Abstract

Coherence properties of different light sources and how they affect the image quality of holographic display are investigated. Temporal coherence is related to the intrinsic spectrum bandwidth of the light source, while spatial coherence can be affected by the size of the light source and propagation distance in use. These two coherence properties are measured for various light sources of diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) laser, laser diode (LD), light emitting diode (LED), super luminescent light emitting diode (sLED) and micro light emitting diode (mLED) in different settings, together with the quality of the holographic reconstructed images. Although the image sharpness and speckle are related to both coherence parameters, our results and subsequent analysis show that the spatial coherence can be linked directly to the image sharpness and the temporal coherence to the speckle. This will provide a quantitative way not only to optimize the image quality between uniformity and sharpness but also to determine the safety power level for different light sources when viewing the produced images by human eyes directly.

Highlights

Holographic displays can reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) images with full wavefront information[1,2,3,4,5,6], which is free from issues such as lack of accommodation depth cue, discontinuous motion parallax and crosstalk[7,8,9,10,11]
Coherence property of a light source can be characterized by its temporal coherence and spatial coherence values, respectively
It is found that the image sharpness value is linear proportional to spatial coherence value, while the speckle contrast value is linear proportional to the temporal coherence value

Summary

Results

We measure the degree of spatial coherence for LED (without pinhole, a high power green LED is used to obtain clear interference patterns, even with small emitting size or long propagation distance in later experiment), mLED, sLED and DPSS laser. The actual edge intensity profile will be the convolution of the ideal step function with a point

Speckle Contrast

Conclusions

Additional Information