Off-axis digital holographic multiplexing for rapid wavefront acquisition and processing

Off-axis holographic multiplexing involves capturing several complex wavefronts, each encoded into off-axis holograms with different interference fringe orientations, simultaneously, with a single camera acquisition. Thus, the multiplexed off-axis hologram can capture several wavefronts at once, where each one encodes different information from the sample, using the same number of pixels typically required for acquiring a single conventional off-axis hologram encoding only one sample wavefront. This gives rise to many possible applications, with focus on acquisition of dynamic samples, with hundreds of scientific papers already published in the last decade. These include field-of-view multiplexing, depth-of-field multiplexing, angular perspective multiplexing for tomographic phase microscopy for 3-D refractive index imaging, multiple wavelength multiplexing for multiwavelength phase unwrapping or for spectroscopy, performing super-resolution holographic imaging with synthetic aperture with simultaneous acquisition, holographic imaging of ultrafast events by encoding different temporal events into the parallel channels using laser pulses, measuring the Jones matrix and the birefringence of the sample from a single multiplexed hologram, and measuring several fluorescent microscopy channels and quantitative phase profiles together, among others. Each of the multiplexing techniques opens new perspectives for applying holography to efficiently measure challenging biological and metrological samples. Furthermore, even if the multiplexing is done digitally, off-axis holographic multiplexing is useful for rapid processing of the wavefront, for holographic compression, and for visualization purposes. Although each of these applications typically requires a different optical system or processing, they all share the same theoretical background. We therefore review the theory, various optical systems, applications, and perspectives of the field of off-axis holographic multiplexing, with the goal of stimulating its further development.