Real-time reconstruction of digital holograms with GPU

Digital holography made it possible to capture and reconstruct holograms in a computer environment. In a conventional CPU, the real-time reconstruction is not possible when the size of the holograms increase to several mega-pixels range. However, a graphics processor can provide the required computational power. The rapid developments in commercial graphics card technology provide an opportunity to process large blocks of data in a very short amount of time which reduces the hologram reconstruction time significantly. In this manuscript, basics of GPU programming for hologram reconstruction is introduced, and the efficiency of CPU and GPU implementations of the three reconstruction algorithms (Fresnel transformation, angular spectrum method, convolution with free space propagation) are compared. Experimental results indicate that, on average, 100 fps reconstruction rate is achieved with all methods.