Photon counting digital holography

Digital holography uses electronic sensors for hologram recording and numerical method for hologram reconstruction enabling thus the development of advanced holography applications. However, in some cases, the useful information is concealed in a very wide dynamic range of illumination intensities and successful recording requires an appropriate dynamic range of the sensor. An effective solution to this problem is the use of a photon-counting detector. Such detectors possess counting rates of the order of tens to hundreds of millions counts per second, but conditions of recording holograms have to be investigated in greater detail. Here, we summarize our main findings on this problem. First, conditions for optimum recording of digital holograms for detecting a signal significantly below detector's noise are analyzed in terms of the most important holographic measures. Second, for time-averaged digital holograms, optimum recordings were investigated for exposures shorter than the vibration cycle. In both cases, these conditions are studied by simulations and experiments.