Impact of shot noise and quantization in a self-interference incoherent digital holography

We analyzed two noise sources in order to explain strong noise impact usually observed for the reconstructed images in a SIDH system with spatially incoherent illumination. The analysis involved numerical modelling of the propagation and manipulation of the spherical waves from the point sources that formed the object to the optical sensor, and recording of four 8-bit encoded phase-shifted incoherent holograms with detector shot noise. We synthesized a computer-generated hologram for the point sources in a plane parallel to the sensor plane, using our approach based on the similarities in the holograms of unit amplitude point sources. We assessed the quality of the reconstructed images using popular metrics such as MSE, PSNR, and SSIM. We studied the noise impact depending on such parameters as the number of the point sources in the object and the irradiance within the exposure interval. We also compared the results of simulation to the experimental reconstructions.