Computer-Generated Holograms for 3D Imaging: A Survey

Holography is usually considered as the ultimate way to visually reproduce a three-dimensional scene. Computer-generated holography constitutes an important branch of holography, which enables visualization of artificially generated scenes as well as real three-dimensional scenes recorded under white-light illumination. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of methods for synthesis of computer-generated holograms, classifying them into two broad categories: wavefront-based methods and ray-based methods. We examine their modern implementations in terms of the quality of reconstruction and computational efficiency. As it is an integral part of computer-generated holography, we devote a special section to speckle suppression, which is also discussed under two categories following the classification of underlying computer-generated hologram methods.