Novel method for converting digital Fresnel hologram to phase-only hologram based on bidirectional error diffusion

We report a novel and fast method for converting a digital, complex Fresnel hologram into a phase-only hologram. Briefly, the pixels in the complex hologram are scanned sequentially in a row by row manner. The odd and even rows are scanned from opposite directions, constituting to a bidirectional error diffusion process. The magnitude of each visited pixel is forced to be a constant value, while preserving the exact phase value. The resulting error is diffused to the neighboring pixels that have not been visited before. The resulting novel phase-only hologram is called the bidirectional error diffusion (BERD) hologram. The reconstructed image from the BERD hologram exhibits high fidelity as compared with those obtained with the original complex hologram. ©2013 Optical Society of America.