High-speed computation of holograms for 3D wavefront engineering

Abstract

High speed computation of holograms for three-dimensional (3D) wavefront engineering is demonstrated through the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU) or video card. We show computational speed gains even on the modest hardware included in most modern laptops. Parallelization of the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm and the angular spectrum method used to compute the holograms are discussed. We achieve computational speed gains of 2-5x on a laptop and up to 26x on a desktop computer GPU. The performance gains on the portable hardware indicates the possibility of constructing a setup capable of 3D wavefront engineering with near- realtime response times (< 2 secs). All aspects of the experimental setup, including wavefront design and hardware control is handled by a single, portable device.