Compressive optical scanning holography

Optical scanning holography (OSH) is a technique that employs a single-pixel sensor to capture the hologram of a three-dimensional object through a sequential row-by-row scanning process. Being different from standard digital hologram acquisition methods that are based on a two-dimensional camera with restricted capturing area and highly limited spatial resolution, OSH is capable of acquiring holograms of wide-field scenes with high resolution. However, this favorable feature also implies a large data size that inevitably leads to various problems in the transmission and processing of the holographic data. In this paper, we propose a new framework, which we call compressive optical scanning holography (COSH), to handle this problem. Briefly, we incorporate a near computational-free and noniterative method to select the hologram pixels to be included in the optical scanning process, and subsequently to convert the value of each acquired pixel into a 1-bit binary representation at the moment when it is detected by the single-pixel sensor. As such, the data size of the hologram can be reduced by one to two order(s) of magnitude. In addition, in the selection of the pixels with our proposed method, the hologram row that is likely to contain similar content to the previous row is not scanned, hence leading to a considerable reduction in the hologram acquisition time. At the receiving end, the hologram can be recovered through simple interpolation of the compressed data. The compressive OSH capturing system can be realized to operate at video rate with very simple hardware or software implementation. We have demonstrated experimentally that the proposed COSH method is capable of acquiring a hologram with less than 1% of its original data size, and still preserving good fidelity on its contents.