Speckle elimination using shift-averaging in high-rate holographic projection

Speckle is a major source of noise in holographic projection. Time averaging of multiple holograms may be used to reduce speckle contrast, but multiple holograms must be calculated per each frame, costing in computational power. We show that a single hologram may be used to generate a fully speckle-free reconstruction, by cyclic shifting and time averaging. We demonstrate the concept experimentally, and discuss its application for high-rate holographic projection systems. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America