Broadband Digital Holographic Camera for Microscopy

In this thesis, we explore a combination of analog and digital holographic techniques to demonstrate high speed quantitative phase imaging (QPI) using low coherence (broad bandwidth) light sources. Off-axis digital holographic microscopy is inherently a coherent method of phase quantification and thus suffers from coherent noise. However, only one measurement is required to retrieve field information which gives an advantage in term of image acquisition speed. While incoherent methods of phase quantification remove the problem of coherent noise, they require acquiring several measurements which is sometimes not acceptable in the study of dynamical systems. Therefore, this thesis is an attempt to extend off-axis digital holographic microscopy from the coherent to the incoherent regime to maintain the benefit of high speed measurement capability of off-axis holography while reducing the coherent noise. First, we demonstrate that by using a suitable combination of holographic gratings, off-axis digital holographic microscopy can work with spectrally broadband illumination sources. Holographic gratings introduce a tilt in the coherence plane of one of the reference or object arms of an off-axis digital holographic microscope to expand the interference area to the whole field of view of the camera. Although QPI provides useful information in addition to state-of-the-art intensity-based microscopic imaging, its use has not permeated yet far beyond research laboratories. One potential reason is the need for a stand-alone dedicated microscope system, which is expensive and not back-compatible to the existing wide-field microscopes. In this Regard, the second part of this thesis explores an add-on camera module which can be attached to the camera port of any standard intensity microscope. The techniques developed to extend the off-axis DHM in the first part of the thesis will be used to demonstrate a proof-of-concept camera module which operates with broadband light sources. Overall, through the combination of analog and digital holography, the goal of this work is to extend full-field off-axis holography to incoherent regime to benefit from real-time speckle-free measurements, optical sectioning and realization of a digital holographic camera which can be placed in the image plane of a standard optical microscope.