Myung K. "Paul" Kim

tel: 813 974 5223
fax: 813 974 5813
E-mail: mkkim@cas.usf.edu

Area of Expertise

Biography

Lecture Title(s)

Digital Holography for Biomedical Imaging
Dennis Gabor invented holography in 1948 while attempting to improve the resolution of electron microscopy. At the time however his invention could not be made practical, as there were no sources available with the required coherence. The invention of laser and the introduction of off-axis holography provided the critical elements to make holography practical and powerful tool for large areas of applications from metrology, data storage, optical processing, device fabrication, and even fine arts. On the other hand, the conventional process of holography using photographic plates is time-consuming and cumbersome. Real time process is not feasible unless one uses photorefractives and other nonlinear optical materials. Recently, the field has been undergoing another paradigm shift to digital holography, where the holographic interference pattern is digitally sampled by CCD camera and the image is numerically reconstructed by applying the results from the diffraction theory. It offers a number of significant advantages such as the ability to acquire the images rapidly, the availability of both the amplitude and the phase information of the optical field and the versatility of the image processing techniques that can be applied to the complex field data. The availability of the phase information of the optical field gives rise to many especially simple and direct techniques of holographic interference imaging.