Impact of shot noise and quantization in a self-interference incoherent digital holography

We analyzed the strong impact of noise on the reconstructed images in a self-interference incoherent digital holographic (SIDH) system with spatially incoherent illumination. The analysis involved numerical modelling of the propagation and manipulation of the spherical waves emitted by the point sources that formed the object from the system entrance to the optical sensor, as well as recording of four 8-bit encoded phase-shifted incoherent holograms contaminated by detector shot noise. We synthesized a computer-generated hologram for the point sources in a plane parallel to the sensor plane, using our approach based on the similarities in the holograms of unit amplitude point sources. We assessed the quality of the reconstructed images using popular metrics such as MSE, PSNR, and SSIM. We compared simulation to experimental reconstructions and observed the same noise behavior in both cases.