GPU-based digital hologram reconstruction and particle detection

University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. December 2014. Major: Electrical Engineering. Advisor: John Sartori. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 39 pages, appendix ADigital holograms, when combined with tracer particles, can be used for examining otherwise-invisible fluid flows. These holograms can be captured with standard digital imaging equipment, however processing them to extract tracer or particle locations is computationally expensive. Exacerbating the issue is that hundreds or thousands of holograms must be reconstructed to analyze a single flow.Presented here is a hologram reconstruction and particle extraction system exploiting the massive parallelism of graphics processing units (GPUs) to reduce the time required to locate the particles in 3D space by orders of magnitude. This system requires no expensive proprietary hardware and runs on standard computers, with the only special requirement being an off-the-shelf Nvidia GPU