High-speed parallel phase-shifting digital holography system using special-purpose computer for image reconstruction

Abstract

We report a high-speed parallel phase-shifting digital holography system using a special-purpose computer for image reconstruction. Parallel phase-shifting digital holography is a technique capable of single-shot phase-shifting interferometry. This technique records information of multiple phase-shifted holograms required for calculation of phase-shifting interferometry with a single shot by using space-division multiplexing. This technique needs image-reconstruction process for a huge amount of recorded holograms. In particular, it takes a long time to calculate light propagation based on fast Fourier transform in the process and to obtain a motion picture of a dynamically and fast moving object. Then we designed a special-purpose computer for accelerating the image-reconstruction process of parallel phase-shifting digital holography. We developed a special-purpose computer consisting of VC707 evaluation kit (Xilinx Inc.) which is a field programmable gate array board. We also recorded holograms consisting of 128 × 128 pixels at a frame rate of 180,000 frames per second by the constructed parallel phase-shifting digital holography system. By applying the developed computer to the recorded holograms, we confirmed that the designed computer can accelerate the calculation of image-reconstruction process of parallel phase-shifting digital holography ~50 times faster than a CPU.