Comparison of binary hologram generation methods: Sampling on the object image scene and error diffusion method on the hologram plane

Holography is a technique to record and reconstruct a three dimensional scene on a 2D plane, which is called a hologram. As a special kind of 2D image, the digital image processing of holograms such as gray level image binarization can be quite different from conventional images. The generation of binary holograms from gray level holograms can be implemented not only with conventional dithering or error diffusion methods but also sampling methods on the object image proposed recently. This paper compares the reconstructed image quality of binary holograms generated by the traditional error diffusion method on the hologram plane and the new random plus adaptive sampling method on the object image. The advantages and disadvantages of two methods are analyzed critically and illustrated with examples.