Holography and Its Applications

Abstract

Holography, initiated by the work of Dennis Gabor (1) in 1948, has now joined in scope and ramifications the fields of communication and information sciences: It includes, in fact, increasingly the developments of these fields, based on the original contributions of Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, among others. Through recent developments in technology, including the laser, as well as in the underlying mathematics and systems theory, including Fourier transform methods, the ramifications of communication and information sciences, as well as of holography are attaining new levels of importance and interest throughout physics, engineering, astronomy, medicine and biology, among many others. In all contemporary forms, of course, these fields now make increasing use of computers in their several forms. In fact, many of the most impressive applications of holography, beyond its 3-dimensional (3-D) imaging capabilities, and the related remarkable achievements of holographic interferometry, are appearing to be of a ‘computational’ nature: the field of ‘optical computing’ is gaining an increasing importance (2), and its potentials were recognized clearly from the beginning when the first textbooks started to appear in the middle 1960’s (3)(4)(5) etc. Even earlier, in the late 1950’s, holographic principles were used to reconstruct images with coherent light (later lasers) from film records, originally recorded with microwaves, as in the well-known coherent synthetic-aperture side-looking radar (6).

This work was completed during a stay as a Gastprofessor at the Institut für Nachrichtentechnik, Technische Universität, München under a “Humboldt Prize” from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1978–1979)