Quantitative assessment of lateral resolution improvement in digital holography

Controllable experimental features such as wavelength, camera’s specifications and reconstruction distance, determine the theoretical limit for lateral resolution in digital holography; however, due to the speckle noise associated to any coherent imaging system it is not possible to reach this theoretical limit. In this paper, a quantitative study the lateral resolution for digital holography under the effect the speckle noise is carried out. It is shown that by reducing the contrast of the speckle noise the resolution capabilities of digital holography are improved; the signal-to-noise ratio of the reconstructed holograms is the metric use to quantitatively assess the reached resolution in the holographic experiments.