Spatial resolution enhancement in holographic imaging via angular spectrum expansion

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to enhance spatial resolution in digital holography by expanding the angular spectrum through replica analysis, enabling high-resolution imaging with low-NA holograms over wide fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to improve holographic resolution by leveraging angular spectrum expansion and replica analysis, validated through simulations and experiments.

Findings

High-resolution images achievable with low-NA holograms.

Angular spectrum expansion effectively mitigates aliasing artifacts.

Numerical and optical results confirm the method's effectiveness.

Abstract

Digital holography numerically restores three-dimensional image information using optically captured diffractive waves. The required bandwidth is larger than that of hologram pixel at a closer distance in the Fresnel diffraction regime, which results in the formation of aliased replica patterns in digital hologram. From the analysis of sampling phenomenon, the replica functions are revealed to be the components of higher angular spectra of hologram. Undersampled hologram consists of the moire patterns formed by the modulation of original function by complex exponential function. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the replicas in both real and Fourier spaces. The possibility to acquire high-resolution images over a wide field view is explored in terms of the expansion process of angular spectrum by using replicas. Only a low-NA hologram captured over a wide field restores a high-resolution image when using an optimization algorithm. Numerical simulations and optical experiments are performed to investigate the proposed scheme.