SPADEDH: a sparsity-based denoising method of digital holograms without knowing the noise statistics

In this paper we propose a robust method to suppress the noise components in digital holography (DH), called SPADEDH (SPArsity DEnoising of Digital Holograms), that does not consider any prior knowledge or estimation about the statistics of the noise. In the full digital holographic process we must mainly deal with two kinds of noise. The first one is an additive uncorrelated noise that corrupts the observed irradiance, the other one is the multiplicative phase noise called speckle noise. We consider both lensless and microscope configurations and we prove that the proposed algorithm works efficiently in all considered cases suppressing the aforementioned noise components. In addition, for digital holograms recorded in lensless configuration, we show the improvement in a display test by using a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM). (C) 2012 Optical Society of America