Abstract

Applications of computer-generated holograms (CGHs) have expanded beyond the well-known area of optical testing to include diffractive optics, optical filters for pattern recognition, and 3-D display. The CGHs fabricated by commercially available optical or electron-beam writers are of special interest because they have a large space- bandwidth product (number of pixels in the hologram, ≥ 10¹⁰) and have high resolution (≤1 μm). The processes of designing and fabricating CGHs are often laborious. Depending on the background of the system designer, who contemplates the use of CGHs, he may be bewildered by the array of encoding schemes, the potentially explosive computational and data storage requirements, or the poorly defined procedures for transferring the design into a physical element. This situation is not unlike the conditions in mechanical and electronic design that prompted the creation of computer-aided design (CAD) work stations.

© 1988 Optical Society of America