Single-exposure color digital holography

Abstract

In this paper, we report a method for color image reconstruction by recording only one single multi-wavelength hologram. In the recording process, three lasers of different wavelengths emitting in the red, green and blue regions are used for illuminating on the object and the object diffraction fields will arrive at the hologram plane simultaneously. Three reference beams with different spatial angles will interfere with the corresponding object diffraction fields on the hologram plane, respectively. Finally, a series of sub-holograms incoherently overlapped on the CCD to be recorded as a multi-wavelength hologram. Angular division multiplexing is employed to reference beams so that the spatial spectra of the multiple recordings will be separated in the Fourier plane. In the reconstruction process, the multi-wavelength hologram will be Fourier transformed into its Fourier plane, where the spatial spectra of different wavelengths are separated and can be easily extracted by employing frequency filtering. The extracted spectra are used to reconstruct the corresponding monochromatic complex amplitudes, which will be synthesized to reconstruct the color image. For singleexposure recording technique, it is convenient for applications on the real-time image processing fields. However, the quality of the reconstructed images is affected by speckle noise. How to improve the quality of the images needs for further research.