Refraction correction in holographic interferometry and tomography of transparent objects

In this paper we review and extend the state of the art in the algorithms that have been developed to tomographically reconstruct 1-D and 2-D refractive-index fields in the presence of significant refraction. A perturbation approach and two iterative procedures were tested and compared in numerical simulation of holographic interferometry experiments. Due to the nonlinearity of the problem, it is very difficult to draw general conclusions with respect to the behavior of the iterative algorithms, which is divergent in the examples presented here. In contrast, the perturbation technique, which is the easiest one to implement and the fastest to run, is shown to be very powerful in reducing refraction errors.