Comparison of kinoform synthesis methods for image reconstruction in Fourier plane

Kinoform is synthesized phase diffractive optical element which allows to reconstruct image by its illumination with plane wave. Kinoforms are used in image processing systems. For tasks of kinoform synthesis iterative methods had become wide-spread because of relatively small error of resulting intensity distribution. There are articles in which two or three iterative methods are compared but they use only one or several test images. The goal of this work is to compare iterative methods by using many test images of different types. Images were reconstructed in Fourier plane from synthesized kinoforms displayed on phase-only LCOS SLM. Quality of reconstructed images and computational resources of the methods were analyzed. For kinoform synthesis four methods were implemented in programming environment: Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm (GS), Fienup algorithm (F), adaptive-additive algorithm (AA) and Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm with weight coefficients (GSW). To compare these methods 50 test images with different characteristics were used: binary and grayscale, contour and non-contour. Resolution of images varied from 64×64 to 1024×1024. Occupancy of images ranged from 0.008 to 0.89. Quantity of phase levels of synthesized kinoforms was 256 which is equal to number of phase levels of SLM LCOS HoloEye PLUTO VIS. Under numerical testing it was found that the best quality of reconstructed images provides the AA method. The GS, F and GSW methods showed worse results but roughly similar between each other. Execution time of single iteration of the analyzed methods is minimal for the GS method. The F method provides maximum execution time. Synthesized kinoforms were optically reconstructed using phase-only LCOS SLM HoloEye PLUTO VIS. Results of optical reconstruction were compared to the numerical ones. The AA method showed slightly better results than other methods especially in case of gray-scale images.