Interactive computation of holograms using a look-up table

Several methods of increasing the speed and simplicity of the computation of o axis transmission holograms are presented with applications to the real time display of holographic images The bipolar intensity approach allows for the real valued linear summation of interference fringes a factor of speed increase and the elimination of image noise caused by object self interference An order of magnitude speed increase is obtained through the use of a precomputed look up table containing a large array of elemental interference patterns corresponding to point source contributions from each of the possible locations in image space Results achieved using a data parallel supercomputer to compute horizontal parallax only holographic patterns containing megasamples indicate that an image comprised of points with arbitrary brightness gray scale can be computed in under second Implemented on a common workstation the look up table approach increases computation speed by a factor of