Multi-dimensional Imaging

Chapter 3Digital Hologram Processing in On-Axis Holography

Corinne Fournier, Loïc Denis, Mozhdeh Seifi and Thierry Fournel

Laboratoire Hubert Curien, Saint Etienne University, France

3.1 Introduction

The quantitative three-dimensional reconstruction and tracking of micro or nano objects spread in a volume is of great interest in many fields of science, such as in biomedical fields (e.g., tracking of markers), fluid mechanics (e.g., the study of turbulence or evaporation phenomena), and chemical engineering (e.g., the study of reactive multiphase flow), among many other applications. The development of accurate and high-speed 3-D imaging systems is crucial in these fields. Several imaging techniques have been investigated during the last 20 years, such as 3-D Particle Tracking Velocimetry with four cameras (Virant and Dracos [1997]) or extended Laser Doppler Anemometry (Volk et al. [2008]). Three-dimensional tracking has been performed with single-molecule fluorescent microscopy using nanometer-sized fluorescent markers based on astigmatism optics (Huang et al. [2008]), double-helix PSF (Pavani et al. [2009]), or multi-plane detection (Pavani et al. [2009]). Each of these techniques has its own advantages and limitations but none of these techniques can yet compete in accuracy with digital holography (DH) to reconstruct 3-D trajectories and size of high speed moving objects.

DH is a non invasive 3-D metrological tool that is suitable for fast moving object reconstruction and ...