Studies on the sparsifying operator in compressive digital holography

In compressive digital holography, we reconstruct sparse object wavefields from undersampled holograms by solving an l(1)-minimization problem. Applying wavelet transformations to the object wavefields produces the necessary sparse representations, but prior work clings to transformations with too few vanishing moments. We put several wavelet transformations belonging to different wavelet families to the test by evaluating their sparsifying properties, the number of hologram samples that are required to reconstruct the sparse wavefields perfectly, and the robustness of the reconstructions to additive noise and sparsity defects. In particular, we recommend the CDF 9/7 and 17/11 wavelet transformations, as well as their reverse counterparts, because they yield sufficiently sparse representations for most accustomed wavefields in combination with robust reconstructions. These and other recommendations are procured from simulations and are validated using biased, noisy holograms. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America