Rough surface characterization using off-axis digital holographic microscopy compensated with self-hologram rotation

In this paper, an off-axis digital holographic microscopy compensated with self-hologram rotation is presented. The process is implemented via subtracting the unwrapped phase maps of the off-axis parabolic hologram and its rotation 180° to eliminate the tilt induced by the angle between the spherical object wave O and the plane reference wave R. Merit of the proposed method is that it can be done without prior knowledge of physical parameters and hence can reconstruct a parabolic hologram of 1024 × 768 pixels within tens of milliseconds since it doesn't require a digital reference wave. The method is applied to characterize rough gold bumps and the obtained results were compared with those extracted from the conventional reconstruction method. The comparison showed that the proposed method can characterize rough surfaces with excellent contrast and in real-time. Merit of the proposed method is that it can be used for monitoring smaller biological cells and micro-fluidic devices.