Edge and contrast enhancement using spatially incoherent correlation holography techniques

Abstract

Image enhancement techniques (such as edge and contrast enhancement) are essential for many imaging applications. In incoherent holography techniques such as Fresnel incoherent correlation holography (FINCH), the light from an object is split into two, each of which is modulated differently from one another by two different quadratic phase functions and coherently interfered to generate the hologram. The hologram can be reconstructed via a numerical backpropagation. The edge enhancement procedure in FINCH requires the modulation of one of the beams by a spiral phase element and, upon reconstruction, edge-enhanced images are obtained. An optical technique for edge enhancement in coded aperture imaging (CAI) techniques that does not involve two-beam interference has not been established yet. In this study, we propose and demonstrate an iterative algorithm that can yield from the experimentally recorded point spread function (PSF), a synthetic PSF that can generate edge-enhanced reconstructions when processed with the object hologram. The edge-enhanced reconstructions are subtracted from the original reconstructions to obtain contrast enhancement. The technique has been demonstrated on FINCH and CAI methods with different spectral conditions.