Formulation for quantitative performance evaluation of holographic imaging

Abstract

In this article, an alternative approach is proposed to quantitatively evaluate image quality of holographic reconstructions. Instead of the conventional approach outlined by the Rayleigh resolution criterion, this approach describes the image quality in terms of the certainty of the estimation of the source distribution. Given the classical imaging parameters, this formulation gives results in exact agreement with the Rayleigh criterion. In addition, this formulation can be extended to quantitatively evaluate the degradation factors such as aperture offset, wave field sampling, quantization error, noise level, and phase-only data acquisition that are not considered in the formulation of Rayleigh resolution criterion. This approach can be also used for quantitative performance evaluation of enhancement algorithms for comparison purposes.