Phase aberration compensation and parasitic fringes elimination in digital holographic microscopy based on polarization

In digital holographic microscopy, parasitic fringes caused by optical components and phase aberration introduced by the optical system are crucial issues that constrain measurement accuracy and reconstructed image quality. This paper presents a straightforward and effective physical approach to simultaneously compensate aberration and eliminate parasitic fringes in reflective holographic microscopy. By modulating the polarization states of both the parasitic beams and the sample beam, combined with a polarized beam splitter element, parasitic fringes can be efficiently eliminated. An improved reflective double exposure optical configuration is integrated into the proposed holographic microscopy. A criterion based on the number of interference fringes is developed to ensure the consistency between the phase aberrations recorded by the flat mirror and that recorded by the sample, which significantly improves the accuracy and robustness of reflective double exposure methods. Experimental results of a terahertz chip and a SoC chip demonstrate that the proposed method can eliminate arbitrary parasitic fringes while preserving image details, which is a challenge with traditional image filtering methods. Moreover, the proposed improved reflective double exposure method can compensate all aberrations regardless of the sample's morphology, without the need for complex numerical computations, prior knowledge of the morphology, or the troublesome and challenging optical alignment process.