Restoration of digital off-axis Fresnel hologram by exemplar and search based image inpainting with enhanced computing speed

In this paper, we proposed a method for restoration of heavily damaged digital off-axis Fresnel holograms based on image inpainting. Being different from existing image inpainting algorithms, we have employed Artificial Bee Colony search technique to increase the computation efficiency of the inpainting process, resulting in a reduction of over one order of magnitude in the computation time. Briefly, an exemplar and search based image inpainting technique is applied to fill in the damaged regions in the hologram, with the most similar fringe patterns in the intact areas obtained from Artificial Bee Colony search algorithm. Experimental results reveal that with our proposed method, the pictorial information in heavily damaged holograms can be recovered with good fidelity, as compared with those obtained with the original intact holograms. This is the first time that image inpainting technique is applied on hologram restoration.