Optical compensation of distorted data image caused by interference fringe distortion in holographic data storage.

Photopolymer materials shrink because of photopolymerization. This shrinkage distorts the recorded interference fringes in a medium made of such material, which in turn degrades the reconstructed image quality. Adaptive optics controlled by a genetic algorithm was developed to optimize the wavefront of the reference beam while reproducing in order to compensate for the interference fringe distortion. We defined a fitness measure for this genetic algorithm that involves the mean brightness and coefficients of the variations of bit data "1" and "0". In an experiment, the adaptive optics improved the reconstructed image to the extent that data could be reproduced from the entire area of the image, and the signal to noise ratio of the reproduced data could be improved.