Photon-starved snapshot holography

Abstract

Digital holography (DH) is a powerful imaging modality that is capable of capturing the object wavefront information, making it very valuable for diverse scientific research applications. Generally, it requires ample illumination to enable good fringe visibility and a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio. As such, in situations such as probing live cells with minimal light interaction and high-speed volumetric tracking in flow cytometry, the holograms generated with a limited photon budget suffer from poor pattern visibility. While it is possible to make use of photon-counting detectors to improve the hologram quality, the long recording procedure coupled with the need for mechanical scanning means that real-time extremely low-light holographic imaging remains a formidable challenge. Here, we develop a snapshot DH that can operate at an ultra-low photon level (less than one photon per pixel). This is achieved by leveraging a quanta image sensor to capture a stack of binary holographic frames and then computationally reconstructing the wavefront through integrating the mathematical imaging model and the data-driven processing, an approach that we termed PSHoloNet. The robustness and versatility of our DH system are demonstrated on both synthetic and experimental holograms with two common DH tasks, namely particle volumetric reconstruction and phase imaging. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to expand DH to the photon-starved regime, and our method will enable more advanced holography applications in various scientific imaging systems.