language: en

[Published in SPIE Proceeding #1667 Practical Holography VI (SPIE, Bellingham, WA, February 1992) paper #04 (in press).]

Optimization of Hologram Computation for Real-Time Display

Mark Lucente
MIT Media Laboratory Spatial Imaging Group
20 Ames St. Cambridge, MA 02139 USA

ABSTRACT Several methods of increasing the speed and simplicity of the computation of off-axis transmission holograms are presented, with applications to the real-time display of holographic images. A bipolar intensity approach enables a linear summation of interference fringes, a factor of two speed increase, and the elimination of image noise caused by object self-interference. An order of magnitude speed increase is obtained through the use of precomputed look-up tables containing a large array of elemental interference patterns corresponding to point source contributions from each of the possible locations in image space. Results achieved using a data-parallel supercomputer to compute horizontal-parallax-only holographic patterns containing 6 megasamples indicate that an image comprised of 10,000 points with arbitrary brightness (grayscale) can be computed in under one second.

INTRODUCTION