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Digital Holography: Digital Hologram Recording, Numerical Reconstruction, and Related Techniques

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Holography is an advanced form of photography that allows an image to be recorded in three dimensions. The difference between holography and photography is best understood by considering what a black and white photograph actually is: it is a point-to-point recording of the intensity of light rays that make up an image. Each point on the photograph records just one thing, the intensity of the light wave that illuminates that particular point. However, the light which makes up a real scene is not only specified by its amplitude and wavelength, but also by its phase. In a photograph, the phase of the light from the original scene is lost. In a hologram, both the amplitude and the phase of the light (usually at one particular wavelength) are recorded. When reconstructed, the resulting light field is identical to that which emanated from the original scene, giving a perfect three-dimensional image. This book is an advanced one on the mathematics of holographic techniques and current research. If anything I just said in this first paragraph is news to you, chances are this book will be over your head.

The book is structured as follows: Optical foundations and the basic principles of holography are discussed in chapter 2. The third chapter describes the process of digital hologram recording and the various methods of numerical reconstruction. Digital holographic interferometry is discussed in chapter 4. The fifth chapter is dedicated to digital holographic microscopy. Special applications and techniques like short coherence recording, particle field applications, and comparative holography are discussed in chapter 6. The last chapter discusses speckle metrology techniques and compares them to digital holographic interferometry.

There is plenty of mathematics, as you would expect, but there are also plenty of instructive figures to help the reader understand what is going on. To get the most out of this book you should already be familiar with multivariable calculus, optics, and electromagnetics. The text is very accessible and not dry in the least. Unfortunately, though, there are no example problems and no exercises. Thus it really is a book focused more on current research than a textbook.

If you are someone who is familiar with optics and would like an accessible beginner's book on holography that is not a non-mathematical hobbyist book but not a research treatise either, I recommend "Basics of Holography" by Hariharan. It costs only $30, covers all of the basics along with applicable mathematics, and has exercises so that you can test your knowledge. After you read that book, come back to this one if you want more advanced knowledge on the subject.

Holograms were invented in 1948 as a means of storing information about the full three dimensional image of the subject. This technology has found increasing applications as the technology has improved.

In recent years digital recording of holographical images has become more practical with the introduction of Charged Coupled Devices (CCD). As with other types of semi-conductors CCDs have gotten more powerful and less expensive. This, combined with the dramatic improvements in computer processing power has allowed research and development into application areas that were impossible to even imagine only a few years ago.

This book is a fairly complete analysis of the research conducted in the last decade. It uses a rigorous mathematical approach and is intended for the serious researcher

The first three chapters are pretty good discussion of the basics. But by the end the writing becomes rushed and incomplete, leaving me asking "where's the rest of it?"

Excluding the TOC, index and Appendix there's only 136 pages that cover a broad range of digital holography topics; barely touching the surface on many of them and leaving examples very incomplete.

The writting is some times strained with poorly constructed sentenses and unexplained terms. It really could have used a round of editing by a good technical writer.