Digital Holographic Recording of a Diffusely Reflecting Object without Speckle Noise

Abstract

Owing to the advancement of faster electronics and digital processing power, the past decade has seen an impressive re-emergence of digital holography [1]. As with conventional holography prominent speckle noise is a severe drawback for diffusely reflecting objects due to the usual coherent nature of the recording process. When compared with their coherent counterparts, incoherent systems have a much better signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, incoherent systems can capture fluorescence information, a big plus for biomedical fluorescence imaging. Currently, there are only two existing systems in incoherent digital holography. The first one is optical scanning holography (OSH) [2] and the other is Fresnel incoherent correlation holography (FINCH) [3]. Both of the techniques have been demonstrated to capture florescence information holographically for biomedical applications [4]. Recently a complex hologram of a diffusely reflecting object has been recorded without speckle noise using OSH [5]. In this talk, we review such technique and discuss that OSH can operate in three modes of operation: coherent mode, partial coherent mode as well as incoherent mode.