Digital off-axis holography without zero-order diffraction via phase manipulation

By means of manipulating the phase information of the object beam in an off-axis digital holographic setup, we show that it is possible to fully eliminate the zero-order diffraction (ZOD) from numerically reconstructed holograms. Two different approaches are presented. In the first method, we introduce a ground glass on the object path beam to provide a random phase illumination. The subtraction between two holograms recorded with different positions of the ground glass yields a ZOD free hologram. In the second approach, a piece of window glass inserted on the path of the object beam produces a constant phase shift. The subtraction of two holograms, one recorded with and one without window glass generates a new hologram whose numerical reconstruction is ZOD free. Theoretical models and experimental results are shown to validate our proposals. They show that the proposed methods totally remove the ZOD without ruining the object information.