Computer generation of binary Fresnel holography

Binarization of Fresnel holograms by direct thresholding based on the polarity of the fringe pattern is studied. It is found that if the hologram is binarized (i.e., for black and white hologram pixels) in this manner, only the edges of the object are preserved in the reconstructed image. To alleviate the errors caused by binarization, the use of error diffusion has been routinely employed. However, the reconstructed image using such standard technique is heavily contaminated with random noise. In this paper, we propose a novel noniterative method for generating Fresnel holograms that are suitable for binarization. Our method is capable of preserving good visual quality on the reconstructed images. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America