Fringe resolution in digital holographic interferometry

This thesis presents the mathematical foundation of digital holography, namely digital sampling of holograms and numerical reconstruction of wavefronts. Then it investigates the minimum fringe separation resolvable in digital holographic interferometry. Speckle tend to degrade the fringe pattern, and a speckle noise factor S is introduced as the ratio of the fringe separation to the pixel size. An S between five and six seems to be a reasonable estimate with the Fresnel method. Larger fringe spacing is necessary with the convolution approach and a numerical lens; the speckle noise factor was about eight in this case. However, this was caused by focusing problems and not a large speckle size. Contour generation with the two-angle method was used to experimentally de-termine S. HoloVision 2.2 did all hologram acquisitions and reconstructions. This software is also presented herein. Prefac