Structural-information Storage in Holograms

The number of degrees of freedom, or structural-information content, of the object wave field recorded in a Leith-Upatnieks hologram is expressed in terms of the resolving power and dimensions of the recording medium, the coherence properties of the primary illumination and the position of the point reference source. In contrast with previous studies, the calculation does not involve the paraxial approximation. It is shown that of all holograms, the Fourier-transform hologram makes the most efficient use of available resolving power and coherence length.