Wavefront printing technique with overlapping approach toward high definition holographic image reconstruction

Abstract

A hologram recording technique, generally called as “wavefront printer”, has been proposed by several research groups for static three-dimensional (3D) image printing. Because the pixel number of current spatial light modulators (SLMs) is not enough to reconstruct the entire wavefront in recording process, typically, hologram data is divided into a set of subhologram data and each wavefront is recorded sequentially as a small sub-hologram cell in tiling manner by using X-Y motorized stage. However since previous works of wavefront printer do not optimize the cell size, the reconstructed images were degraded by obtrusive split line due to visible cell size caused by too large cell size for human eyesight, or by diffraction effect due to discontinuity of phase distribution caused by too small cell size. In this paper, we introduce overlapping recording approach of sub-holograms to achieve both conditions: enough smallness of apparent cell size to make cells invisible and enough largeness of recording cell size to suppress diffraction effect by keeping the phase continuity of reconstructed wavefront. By considering observing condition and optimization of the amount of overlapping and cell size, in the experiment, the proposed approach showed higher quality 3D image reconstruction while the conventional approach suffered visible split lines and cells.