Gabor Holography Reinvented
Preprint describing an optical solution to the long-standing twin-image problem in on-axis Gabor holography.
All-optical, twin-image-free on-axis holography for cleaner and faster quantitative phase and amplitude imaging. Phazor keeps the simplicity of Gabor holography without the need for iterative reconstruction.
What changes
On-axis holography is attractive because it is compact, mechanically robust, and efficient. It works with lower sensor resolution, shorter exposure times, and looser coherence and stability requirements than off-axis approaches.
The tradeoff has always been the twin-image artifact. Most workflows compensate with iterative reconstruction or machine learning, which adds compute cost, latency, and another source of uncertainty. Phazor handles the problem in the optical system directly, for real-time imaging performance.
In practice
In this example, each side of a coin is encoded into its own optical channel, one in amplitude and one in phase. In conventional Gabor holography, the twin image bleeds into both channels during reconstruction, causing the two sides to mix together. Phazor removes this directly in the optics, keeping each channel clean so both sides reconstruct distinctly, with no post-processing required.
Gabor holography

Amplitude

Phase
In conventional Gabor reconstruction, the twin image leaks into both channels, mixing residual features from each face into the other.
Phazor

Amplitude

Phase
With Phazor, the channels separate cleanly. Each face appears only in its intended channel, with no leakage from the opposite side.
Features
Phazor removes the twin image optically without iterative bottlenecks. You get cleaner amplitude and phase data with less ambiguity in the reconstruction.
Phazor enables quantitative phase and amplitude reconstruction without the need for iterative algorithms or trained models, directly cutting compute load.
Common-path robustness, shorter exposure times, relaxed stability requirements, and lower sensor demands all stay intact. That means simpler systems that are easier to use outside tightly controlled lab setups.
Applications
Recover phase and amplitude with fewer reconstruction artifacts, and trust what you see in cells, droplets, microstructures, and other transparent or weakly scattering samples.
Build compact coherent imaging systems that keep the common-path stability of inline holography without taking the usual quality hit in the recovered signal.
When measurement fidelity matters, suppressing artifacts in the optics reduces cleanup downstream and helps repeatability in high-volume inspection work.
Phazor is not tied to one phase-shaper geometry. The same principle can be adapted to tailored optical transfer functions and product-specific imaging systems.
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