Hybrid method for speckle noise reduction in digital holography

In digital holography, the inherited speckle noise degrades imaging quality due to the coherent laser source. To overcome this problem, a hybrid method for speckle noise reduction is presented by combining a novel angular diversity approach with the block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) algorithm. A serial of holograms is first captured by the proposed recording approach, and then the image with high signal-to-noise ratio is obtained by averaging multiple reconstructed intensity images. Finally, the residual noise in the averaged image is further eliminated by the BM3D filtering algorithm. The speckle noise is significantly suppressed, and a nearly speckle-free image can be obtained. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.