Optical scanning holography (OSH) records a three-dimensional object into a two-dimensional hologram through two-dimensional optical scanning. The recovery of sectional images from the hologram, termed as an inverse problem, has been previously implemented by conventional methods as well as the use of l(2) norm. However, conventional methods require time consuming processing of section by section without eliminating the defocus noise and the l(2) norm method often suffers from the drawback of over-smoothing. Moreover, these methods require the whole hologram data (real and imaginary parts) to eliminate the twin image noise, whose computation complexity and the sophisticated post-processing are far from desirable. To handle these difficulties, an adaptively iterative shrinkage-thresholding (AIST) algorithm, characterized by fast computation and adaptive iteration, is proposed in this paper. Using only a half hologram data, the proposed method obtained satisfied on-axis reconstruction free of twin image noise. The experiments of multi-planar reconstruction and improvement of depth of focus further validate the feasibility and flexibility of our proposed AIST algorithm. (c) 2012 Optical Society of America