Review on the State-of-the-Art Technologies for Acquisition and Display of Digital Holograms

Optical holography for recording three-dimensional (3-D) scenes can be traced back to the early sixties. Since then, the art of holography has been applied in many areas, primarily as a tool for 3-D imaging, processing, and display. Extension of optical holography to other disciplines, such as optical computing and encryption, has been explored, but the scope of development is relatively limited. However, with the rapid advancements in electronics, computing, and material science technologies, most of the optical processes can be substituted with numerical or digital hardware means, thus leading to the emergence of digital holography. A typical digital holography framework can be encapsulated into three major stages, namely the input, processing, and output stages. The input and output stages are gatekeepers connecting the optical and digital worlds, without which the study on digital holography could only be restricted to theoretical and numerical analysis. In the past few decades, numerous research works have been conducted on these two important areas. In this paper, we shall provide a review on the recent development in these two important areas of digital holography. Selected pieces of important and popular works on the acquisition and display of digital holograms will be reported.