Referenceless phase holography for displaying 3D scenes captured by digital holography

Referenceless phase holography (RELPH) is a method to display complex wave fields (amplitude and phase) holographically, using two liquid crystal phase-only light modulators in a Michelson-interferometer-based arrangement. The resulting reconstructed wave fields, corresponding to real or artificial 3D scenes, satisfy the 3D cues depth of field, occlusion, and parallax without twin images or zero-order diffraction. The wave fields are decomposed into two mutually coherent wave fields consisting of pure phase distributions with constant amplitude. The phase distributions are then modulated onto the wave fields reflected by the respective spatial light modulators and reconstructed by interference with the Michelson-based setup. Alongside a review of the general RELPH methodology we present the display of real 3D scenes captured via digital holography aiming at real-time or quasi real-time video transmission, containing the transformation of camera pixel pitch and hologram wavelength to the pixel pitch of the light modulators and reconstruction wavelength.