Fast reconstruction of multiple off-axis holograms based on a combination of complex encoding and digital spatial multiplexing

Abstract

An algorithm is proposed for the fast reconstruction of off-axis digital holograms based on a combination of complex encoding (CE) and spatial multiplexing (SM). In this algorithm, every two off-axis holograms recorded in sequence are first assembled into a CE hologram using the CE method, and then four of the CE holograms are again encoded into one complex spatial multiplexing (CSM) hologram based on the SM algorithm. It is demonstrated that the eight holograms encoded into such one CSM hologram can be quickly reconstructed by performing a two-dimensional (2D) Fourier transform (FT) on the CSM hologram. Using this method, the eight 2D FTs required for the reconstruction of the eight holograms in the conventional spatial filtering methods can be simplified to a process with only one 2D FT, which can largely improve the computation efficiency with the resolution of the reconstructed images nearly unchanged.