SPIE Dennis Gabor Award

SPIE Fellow Toyohiko Yatagai, the 2015 SPIE president and a professor at Utsunomiya University (Japan), is the recipient of the 2017 SPIE Dennis Gabor Award for contributions to the development of computer-generated holography and related techniques for optical metrology, information processing, displays, and optical storage.

SPIE presents the award every year to recognize outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wavefront technologies, especially those that further the development of holography and metrology applications.

“Professor Yatagai is considered one of the best researchers in the world in the field. His research is closely followed by many great researchers in academia and industry at an international level,” said SPIE Fellow Bahram Javidi, the Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at University of Connecticut (USA) and the 2005 Dennis Gabor award recipient.

Yatagai pioneered the development and establishment of holographic techniques and digital fringe analysis techniques for modern optical metrology. He proposed a scanning moiré method for three-dimensional shape measurements in a highly cited paper, which is believed to be the first successful application of today’s phase-shift technique to moiré 3D topography.

He also established the foundation of polarization contrast imaging by polarization-sensitive Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography. He has proved the advantage and viability of his technique in real-world clinical applications by putting it into a successful commercial product through collaboration with an optical company.

He was among the first to note the potential of computer-generated holography at its inception. His contributions include a 3D color display technique based on synthetic holograms generated from projection images and a fast computation algorithm for a cylindrical CGH.

Yatagai also is credited for contributing to the progress of optical information processing and optical storage. In the early 1980s, he developed cellular logic optical computing systems and optical neural networks.

He is a founding director of the Center for Optical Research and Education (CORE) at Utsunomiya University. By making CORE an internationally renowned center of excellence in optics and photonics, he wants to establish a new educational paradigm for optical engineering in Japan.

Yatagai will receive the award at SPIE Optics + Photonics in August.

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