Computer-based analysis of hologram imagery and aberrations. I. Hologram types and their nonchromatic aberrations.

Numerical values are shown for the aberrations that are present in holograms which may be constructed and reconstructed from a plane wave or point source. This study centers on four types of hologram geometries: in-line, off-axis, near-image plane, and lensless-fourier transform. The aberrations illustrated in this paper have been caused by a spatial deviation of the reconstruction beam from the location where either an ideal aberration free virtual or real image is reconstructed. In addition to the above analysis of aberrations a close parallelism between the bending characteristics of lenses and the construction geometry of holograms is noted. This analogy between lenses and holograms illustrates the flexibility with which the aberrations of a hologram may be modified by changes in the recording geometry.