Imaging of rotating objects by means of synthesized optical holograms

Abstract

A scheme is presented for producing optical holograms of rotating objects by illuminating the object by a single-frequency coherent laser beam. Along one axis, the synthesis takes place due to rotation of the object; along the other axis, the hologram is synthesized by the coherent radiation field generated by a long linear optical antenna. Numerical simulation shows that reliable discrimination of object images from the accompanying background is possible, for point objects, using a single hologram recorded at one angular position and, for extended flat objects or thin cylinder-like objects, using holograms recorded at two or three angular positions. If the holograms are synthesized in the presence of normally distributed random phase noise, the quality of the reconstructed images of rotating objects remains sufficiently high for root-mean-square noise amplitudes exceeding π/2 and reaching the limiting value 2π/3.