Gauging diffraction patterns: field of view and bandwidth estimation in lensless holography

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical framework for assessing the field of view and bandwidth in lensless holography, highlighting the potential for large FOV and bandwidth constrained by practical setup parameters.

Contribution

It introduces practical bounds for FOV and bandwidth in lensless holography based on noise and source coherence, bridging the gap between theory and experimental limits.

Findings

Theoretically, FOV can be extremely large, limited mainly by wavelength.

Bandwidth is primarily constrained by noise level and source coherence.

Practical bounds help in realistic system design and performance assessment.

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to provide theoretically grounded assessment on both the field-of-view and the bandwidth of a lensless holographic setup. Indeed, while previous works have presented results with super-resolution and field-of-view extrapolation, there is no well established rules to determine them. We show that the theoretical field of view can be hugely large with a spatial-frequency bandwidth only limited by the wavelength leading to an unthinkable number of degrees of freedom. To keep a realistic field of view and bandwidth, we propose several practical bounds based on few setup properties: namely the noise level and the spatio-temporal coherence of the source.