Single-shot speckle reduction by elimination of redundant speckle patterns in digital holography

Convex optimization for additive noise reduction in quantitative complex object wave retrieval using compressive off-axis digital holographic imaging

Image denoising is one of the important problems in the research field of computer vision, artificial intelligence, 3D vision, and image processing, where the fundamental aim is to recover the original image features from a noisy contaminated image. The camera sensor additive noise present in the holographic recording process reduces the quality of the retrieved image. Even though various techniques have been developed to minimize the noise in digital holography, the noise reduction still remains a challenging task. This article presents a compressive sensing (CS) technique to minimize the additive noise in the digital holographic reconstruction process. We demonstrate the reduction of additive noise using complex wave retrieval method as a sensing matrix in the CS model. The proposed CS method to suppress the noise during the reconstruction process is illustrated using numerical simulations. Only 50% of the pixel measurements are considered in the noisy hologram, which is far less than the original complex object pixels. The impact of additive gaussian noise in the recording plane on the reconstruction accuracy of both intensity and phase distribution is analysed. The CS method denoises and estimates the complex object information accurately. The numerical simulation results have shown that the proposed CS method has effectively minimized the noise in the reconstructed image and has greatly improved the quality of both intensity and phase information.

Reduction of speckle noise in digital holography using a neighborhood filter based on multiple sub-reconstructed images

The application of digital holography in several fields is limited since speckle destroys the original information of the reconstructed image. This paper proposes a neighborhood filter based on multiple sub-reconstructed images according to the random distribution of speckle noise. In this method, the denoised value is equal to the weighted sum of neighboring pixel values, and the weight is calculated by the degree of correlation between different positions of multiple sub-holograms. The experimental results show that the method can greatly reduce the speckle noise, and its noise reduction performance is superior to traditional digital image processing algorithms.

Backscatter multiple wavelength digital holography for color micro-particle imaging

This work applies digital holography to image stationary micro-particles in color. The approach involves a Michelson interferometer to mix reference light with the weak intensity light backscattered from a distribution of particles. To enable color images, three wavelengths are used, 430, 532, and 633 nm, as primary light sources. Three separate backscattered holograms are recorded simultaneously, one for each wavelength, which are resolved without spectral cross talk using a three-CMOS prism sensor. Fresnel diffraction theory is used to render monochrome images from each hologram. The images are then combined via additive color mixing with red, green, and blue as the primary colors. The result is a color image similar in appearance to that obtained with a conventional microscope in white-light epi-illumination mode. A variety of colored polyethylene micro-spheres and nonspherical dust particles demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and illustrate the effect of simple speckle-noise suppression and white balance methods. Finally, a chromaticity analysis is applied that is capable of differentiating particles of different colors in a quantitative and objective manner.

Speckle-reduced reconstruction of a single-shot hologram by multiple tip-tilt modulations

Speckle can be attenuated by averaging the reconstructed images of each sub-hologram or being filtered with different filters, at the expense of resolution. We propose a de-speckling method for a single-shot digital hologram while maintaining the resolution. Different tip-tilt phases are demonstrated to cause changes only for the speckle distributions of the reconstructed image. The speckle is attenuated by averaging these intensity images with different speckle distributions. The normalized contrast can be reduced to 0.56 by averaging only 20 different reconstructed images. When the averaged image is processed with block matching and 3D filtering, a further de-speckled image at a normalized contrast of 0.46 can be obtained with highly preserved resolution.