Suppression of phase ambiguity in digital holography by using partial coherence or specimen rotation

In this paper we present two approaches for extracting the surface profile as well as obtaining 3D imaging of near field objects by usage of partial coherence and digital holography. In the first approach a light source with given temporal partial coherence is used to illuminate a near field object. The reflected light is interfered with the reference source. By computing the local contrast of the generated fringes one may estimate the 3D topography and the profile of the object. This approach extracts the 3D information from a single image, and its accuracy does not depend on triangulation angle like in fringe projection methods. The second approach is tomography based. There we illuminate the object from several slightly different angles, and for each we compute the wrapped phase using digital holography techniques. Combining the wrapped phase estimation from several points of projection allows calculating the unwrapped phase and therefore the true profile of even a phase-only object. Increasing the number of points of view decreases the relative error of the estimated profile.