Computational wave optics library for C++: CWO++ library

TL;DR

The paper introduces CWO++, a user-friendly C++ library that accelerates diffraction calculations on CPU and GPU for various optical applications, improving computational efficiency and usability.

Contribution

Development of CWO++, a new C++ library that simplifies and speeds up diffraction and hologram calculations on CPU and GPU platforms.

Findings

CWO++ achieves faster diffraction calculations compared to previous libraries.

The library is user-friendly and compatible with both CPU and GPU.

Performance benchmarks demonstrate significant efficiency improvements.

Abstract

Diffraction calculations, such as the angular spectrum method, and Fresnel diffractions, are used for calculating scalar light propagation. The calculations are used in wide-ranging optics fields: for example, computer generated holograms (CGHs), digital holography, diffractive optical elements, microscopy, image encryption and decryption, three-dimensional analysis for optical devices and so on. However, increasing demands made by large-scale diffraction calculations have rendered the computational power of recent computers insufficient. We have already developed a numerical library for diffraction calculations using a graphic processing unit (GPU), which was named the GWO library. However, this GWO library is not user-friendly, since it is based on C language and was also run only on a GPU. In this paper, we develop a new C++ class library for diffraction and CGH calculations, which is referred as to a CWO++ library, running on a CPU and GPU. We also describe the structure, performance, and usage examples of the CWO++ library.