Improved illumination system for spatial coherence control.

An improved illumination system is proposed for creating a temporally coherent and spatially incoherent extended source to be used for spatial coherence control and reconstruction of a coherent hologram. Taking into account the fact that a rotating ground glass does not behave as an ideal Lambertian diffuser, the new illumination system tailors the directivity of the scattered lights to direct the lights efficiently into an interferometer so that a spatial coherence function can be better controlled and detected with higher fidelity. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate improved performance of the proposed system.