Reduction of speckle noise in the reconstructed image of digital holography

Based on the whole process of recording and reconstruction of digital holography, we study the formation causes of speckle noise in the reconstructed image and its characteristics. And we reach the conclusions that the little hologram aperture diffraction aggravates the speckle noise and the speckle noise in the reconstructed image is a kind of multiplicative noise. Serving as the basis of these features, we propose the reduction technique for speckle noise. Firstly, we set an appropriate aperture function matching the recording parameter and an aperture size of hologram and deconvolve the reconstructed image of the hologram with it. Secondly, we converted the multiplicative noise into additive noise by means of homomorphic transform and realize the separation of signal and noise. Thirdly, we applied the Wiener filtering to reduce the additive noise. Finally, we carried out the inverse transformation. The proposed reduction technique is illustrated with experimental results. Therefore, the paper offers a brand-new thought and practical way of reducing the speckle noise in the reconstructed image of digital holography. (C) 2008 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.