Applications, challenges, and approaches for electronic, digital holography

Digital holography has been around for over thirty years; however only in recent years has necessary and affordable recording and computing hardware become widely available. Some of the first works in digital holography are described as far back as 1966, with others following shortly after that. Today many researchers are working in this area for both application and further development of the technique. Indeed, digital holography may represent the best hope for holography as a thriving area of optics, and science. In this paper we discuss of the many applications, advantages, challenges, and opportunities that exist in the field of digital holography.