Holography and integral photography

JUL 01, 1968

These two complementary methods of 3D imaging both have their special advantages. Lensless photography, or holography, provides a method for precise distortion measurements, information storage and studies, such as bubble‐chamber photography, that require great depth of field. Lenslet, or integral, photography does not need coherent light and is therefore tolerant of subject motion.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3035055

Robert J. Collier

RECENT REVIVAL of interest in things optical, at least for those of us who have had only a desultory brush with formal training in optics, has been stimulated in the main by the emergence of the laser. Aimed with helium–neon, argon cw lasers and ruby pulsed lasers, many former microwave or laser physicists and electrical engineers have turned to exploring and exploiting that art of lensless photography called “holography.” Applying concepts from other disciplines to their new field, optical neophytes have done much to reveal the manifold potential of holography. Unlettered in optical lore, they have also at times blundered into the often unrewarding task of reinventing processes whose properties and limitations have long been investigated. Nevertheless such unwitting archeology does, on occasion, exhume an old idea that may be significant to current efforts and technology. While working with laser‐illumination methods for recording and reconstructing three‐dimensional images without lenses, holographers have become aware of older 3D image‐recording techniques requiring myriads of lenslets. Whether lensless or lenslet, each of these (autostereoscopic) methods allows observation of a 3D image without special viewing apparatus.

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More about the Authors

Robert J. Collier. Bell Telephone Laboratories.