Effective selection of shears in variable lateral shearing holography

The efficiency of reconstruction of complex wavefields in digital holography through shear interferometry has a direct correlation with the shears selected for image acquisition. Although studies to investigate the effect of shears have shown correlations between the selected shear set and the spatial and frequency contents of the reconstructed complex wavefield, to our best knowledge, not much information is available to provide a guide on how to select these shears optimally and what factors to be considered during this selection procedure. In this paper, we study the effect of shear parameters on the phase error through a series of simulations using a synthetic object wavefield and provide a range of shear parameters for optimal reconstruction. Further, we correlated the data by comparing the results with corresponding frequency information density maps.