<title>Phase-shifting digital holography with applications to microscopy and interferometry</title>

Holography enables recording of full information from three-dimensional (3-D) objects on a hologram and to reconstruct wave propagation from the hologram. One of the issues in conventional holography is time and trouble of photographic recording of holograms. Furthermore, the reconstructed images are often taken by a CCD camera followed by a computer that extracts quantitative information. Digital holography that uses recording of holograms by a CCD camera and image reconstruction by a computer realizes direct acquisition of 3-D information and derivation of required quantities. It has become more practical owing to recent advances in CCD's and computers. The earlier digital holography used off-axis setups and the wanted reconstruction is always accompanied by the zero-order and the conjugate images1'2. We got rid of this limitation by introducing phase-shifting technique by which the distribution of complex amplitude at the hologram plane can be directly denved3. We applied this technique to 3-D microscopy4 and analysis of phase objects. This presentation summarizes their main results.