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An algorithm for computing spot-generating holograms

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IOP PUBLISHING JOURNAL OF OPTICS A: PURE AND APPLIED OPTICS
J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 (2008) 015306 (6pp) doi:10.1088/1464-4258/10/01/015306

An algorithm for computing

spot-generating holograms
A Georgiou, T D Wilkinson, N Collings and W A Crossland
Electrical Engineering Division, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge CB3 0FA, UK

E-mail: ag245@cam.ac.uk

Received 10 September 2007, accepted for publication 28 November 2007

Published 9 January 2008
Online at stacks.iop.org/JOptA/10/015306

Abstract
This paper describes a computationally efficient algorithm suitable for designing
spot-generating holograms many times faster that existing techniques without compromise in
the reconstruction quality. This algorithm is best suited for applications where the spatial light
modulator has many pixels and phase levels while the reconstruction plane contains a relatively
small number of spots.

Keywords: computer generated holograms, spot array generation, optical tweezers,

free space optical switches, liquid crystal over silicon, direct binary search

1. Introduction
A coherent wavefront when reflected from a programmable
phase-only hologram will diffract, forming an intensity profile
on the output plane. Power may be distributed to a number of
output spots by changing the displayed hologram. In many
applications the hologram computation must be performed
in real time; thus computational efficient algorithms are
required.
1.1. Holograms and their applications
Phase-only holograms do not use absorbing components, and
in principle their efficiency can reach 100%. This makes them
particularly attractive in applications like free-space optical
switches where there is a tight power budget [1–4]. Other
applications include optical tweezers [5], where the position of
the particle in three dimensions can be controlled by changing
the hologram. In both applications the position of the spots
is unpredictable; thus the hologram must be computed in real
time. Despite the advances in computer science, even simple
spot-generating holograms require substantial computation
that make their computation in real time a challenge [6].
1.2. Hologram computation
The hologram computation is an optimization problem. The
amplitude of the two planes, the hologram and output plane, is
known and fixed, while the phase is unknown. The amplitude
of the hologram plane is restricted to unity due to the phase-
only nature of the hologram and the output plane’s amplitude
is the target intensity of the spots. The aim of any hologram
design algorithm is to compute the phase of the hologram
plane so that these amplitude constraints are best met. Once
the phase of any of the two planes is found, the other plane
can be found using the Fourier or inverse Fourier transform.
As will be discussed later in detail, the output plane phase
optimization (OPPO) algorithm uses this principle to first
optimize the significantly simpler output plane, and then uses
the output plane phase to compute the complex hologram
plane.
During the hologram computation all the possible paths
between the hologram pixels and the points of interest on
the output plane must be computed. For a spot-generating
hologram this is equal to N × N × S complex computations,
where N × N is the number of hologram pixels and S the
number of spots on the output plane. The computation is
further increased because most algorithms are iterative without
a unique solution, and these paths must be computed more
than once. Depending on the algorithm, the number of
phase levels ( p ) may also increase the computation of the
algorithm. A number of hologram computation algorithms
exist that compute a phase-only hologram. Most of them fall
in two categories: the Gerchberg–Saxton (GS) family and the
Boltzmann annealing family.

1464-4258/08/015306+06$30.00 1 © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd Printed in the UK

J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 (2008) 015306
800
1500
E
1
750
Imag[E]
1000 E2E3 E
4
700
500
650
0
0 500 1000 1500
Real[E]
Figure 1. The complex electric field as it evolves during the computation of a 64 × 64 four-spot-generating hologram using DBS. After each
pixel change the new complex electric field was plotted on the real–imaginary plot above. The further away from the origin it is, the larger the
intensity of the output spot is. The electric field follows a rather random path towards maximizing the output intensity.
2. Background—existing algorithms
2.1. Gerchberg–Saxton
Algorithms in the GS family (like Fienup [7] and input–
output [8] algorithms) are particularly efficient when the output
spots are regularly positioned and there is an equal number
of spots and hologram pixels. This allows the use of the fast
Fourier transform (FFT) that accelerates the Fourier transform
computation significantly. The FFT assumes an infinitely
periodic hologram and does not consider the aperture (or
illumination) function, and spots are considered as points.
Spots may be placed only on the well defined grid of the FFT;
thus the spot-positioning accuracy reduces. Note that the effect
of the aperture function may be included with the use of the
discrete Fourier transform (DFT), but the speed advantage of
the FFT is lost and such computation is unfeasible for most
holograms.
The GS algorithm is widely used for image-projecting
holograms [9] where the spots (image pixels) are regularly
positioned. A unit hologram is computed with the same
number of pixels as the image and then repeated to cover the
phase-modulating device.
2.2. Direct binary search
Direct binary search (DBS) [10] is a particular case of the
Boltzmann annealing optimization [11]. It operates by making
random changes on the hologram, and if the reconstruction
quality improves, the change is accepted; otherwise it is
rejected. The quality of the reconstruction is measured by the
cost function that gives a scalar number with which decisions
are made.
DBS has excellent performance in terms of flexibility and
output efficiency. However, the search space is proportional to
the number of pixels ( N × N ) and phase levels ( p ). As the
number of pixels and phase levels increases, the computation
increases disproportionately. It is possible to repeat the
hologram on the device and thus reduce the number of pixels
and consequently reduce the computation, but this also reduces
the capabilities of the hologram. If each state of each pixel is
A Georgiou et al
710
700
690
680
700 800 750 760 770 780
Real[E] Real[E]
tested κNp times, the total number of complex floating point
operations (FLOPs) is equal to
tDBS = κNp × p × S × N 2 (1)
where S is the number of spots on the output plane.
The DBS algorithm becomes very slow for large
holograms. The progress made on the output plane each time
a hologram pixel changes is very small and not always into the
correct direction. This makes the hologram design extremely
slow. To demonstrate this it is more appropriate to observe the
evolution of the output plane. A four-spot-generating hologram
was designed using DBS and the complex values of the electric
field on the output plane were observed after each change on
the hologram. This is shown in figure 1. Each of the three
subplots show the DBS evolution on a different scale. The x -
axis is the real part and the y -axis the imaginary part of the
electric field of the output spots. From this figure it is evident
that the hologram does not evolve in an optimum way. Ideally
all the changes would cause the electric field to form a straight
line starting from near the origin and leading to its final value.
Instead, the changes in the electric field have a nearly random
orientation with only a small preference towards the optimum
direction. This is best shown in the smaller scales of figure 1.
Actually, when using DBS the solution of the hologram
is decided at its early stages of the hologram computation.
This can be seen by inspecting the hologram plane during the
computation process. Three snap shots of the hologram were
taken during the hologram design and are shown in figure 2.
The first snapshot was taken after one hologram scan, i.e. after
all hologram pixels were altered once. The second snapshot
was taken after 2 scans and the third after 35 scans when the
DBS was terminated. It can be seen that after a single iteration
the final form of the hologram is determined. Then, it is just
a matter of performing many pixel flippings until all the pixels
find their optimum value by sheer luck.
The proposed algorithm, the OPPO [12] algorithm, avoids
these steps by calculating the final values of electric fields of
the output plane and then using these to calculate the hologram
plane in a single step.
2
J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 (2008) 015306
hologram after 1 scan
x x
Figure 2. The final form of the hologram is determined at early stages of the DBS algorithm. The first hologram snapshot was taken after
64 × 64 pixel flips. It contains the final solution of the hologram (i.e. after 35 × 64 × 64 pixel flipping) but concealed under a high level of
noise. Between the 2nd and 35th iteration (i.e. for 34 × 64 × 64 pixel flipping) the DBS algorithm is engaged with removing the noise rather
than computing the hologram.
Figure 3. It is possible that two random points on the temporary
hologram (here x1 and x2 ) at different positions will be considered as
one. This occurs because the complex exponentials are periodic
functions. Since points x1 and x2 are in effect sampling the same
points on the sine waves they cannot produce two independent
equations.
3. Method
The OPPO algorithm, is a combination of DBS and the DFT. It
consists of four main steps.
(1) Select a few pixels from the hologram plane with random
positions.
(2) Using only the selected pixels use DBS to design a
temporary hologram forming the target output plane.
(3) Measure the phase of the electric field arriving at the
output spots.
(4) Use inverse DFT together with the phase of the output
spots to compute the full resolution hologram.
3.1. Temporary hologram
A spot-generating hologram is composed of a sum of spatial
frequencies with different phases φ1 , φ2 · · · φ S such that
h(x, y)
ejφ1 ej(u 1 x+v1 y) + ejφ2 ej(u 2 x+v2 y) + · · · ejφ S ej(u S x+vS y)
= jφ j(u x+v y)
|e 1 e 1 1 + ejφ2 ej(u 2 x+v2 y) + · · · ejφS ej(u S x+vS y) |
where x and y are the coordinates on the hologram plane,
(u i , vi ) the coordinates of the i th spot on the reconstruction
plane and h(x, y) the phase-only hologram.
A Georgiou et al
hologram after 2 scans hologram after 35 scans
x
Temporary Hologram Hologram on Device
Figure 4. The first step of the algorithm is to form a temporary
hologram with significantly fewer pixels than the original hologram.
In this figure the temporary hologram has 10 pixels randomly
positioned. In the second step, DBS is used to optimize the
temporary hologram so that it creates the target output plane. Squares
denote individual pixels.
The phase-only hologram is most efficient when the
denominator has the smallest variations of amplitude for all
x and y . Then the absolute value in the denominator has
little effect on the hologram and it affects very little the
reconstruction. A hologram computation algorithm achieves
that by changing the values of the phase parameters φ1 · · · φ S .
In order to determine the optimum values of φ1 · · · φ S at
least S independent equations are required. The S equations
are obtained by taking S different values of x and y (how
these values are chosen will be discussed shortly), which is
equivalent to choosing S pixels on the temporary hologram (see
figure 4).
The S pixels on the temporary hologram must be chosen
such that all S equations are independent. Because the complex
exponentials of equation (2) are periodic it is plausible that two
or more points are chosen that are an integer number of spatial
periods apart. And it is also plausible that another exponential
(2) will have two or three times the spatial frequency of the first,
thus the two points actually count as one. This effect is best
illustrated in figure 3.
The issue of selecting unsuitable pixels on the temporary
hologram can be avoided if (a) the pixels are not an integer
3
J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 (2008) 015306
(Efficiency) vs (Number of pixels on temporary hologram)
0.83
0.825
Efficiency
0.82
0.815
0.81
0.805
0 5 10 15
Number of pixels on temporary hologram
Figure 5. The temporary hologram must contain at least the same number of pixels as there are spots on the output plane. By having a few
times more pixels on the temporary hologram (up to 5 S pixels) the problems arising from having two or more pixels on the same or at a
similar position on the temporary hologram are eliminated.
spatial frequency apart or (b) more than S pixels are used to
compensate for this possibility. The suggested approach is a
combination of both methods.
First the pixels are selected so it is unlikely that they are
an integer spatial frequency apart. To ensure this the pixels
must not be on a regular grid. Having pixels on a regular grid
makes it more likely. If a fixed number of temporary pixels
are arranged on a regular grid, they would have a large pixel
pitch and would occupy the entire hologram or a very small
pixel pitch and would occupy a small area of the hologram. In
the first case high spatial frequencies were likely to be integer
periods apart, and in the second the low frequencies would
have been misrepresented. Choosing pixels randomly avoids
both situations as their spacing varies from small values to
large values.
There is some small probability that two pixels will be
exactly an integer number of spatial frequencies apart. This
probability is determined by the accuracy with which the x
and y coordinates are stored in the computer, and for modern
computers is very small. If the pixels are separated by a
distance similar to an integer number of spatial periods, the
optimization may be dominated by truncation errors.
However, it is more likely that the optimization will take
too long to converge or not converge at all if there are not
sufficient temporary pixels. Different areas on the hologram
contribute by different amount to each output spot. It is
necessary to take a sufficient number of temporary pixels to
ensure fairness between spots and fair representation of the
hologram’s surface. This issue is more apparent in holograms
creating a small number of spots. The worst case scenario is
a two-spot-generating hologram, which divides the hologram
plane in stripes of 0π and π phase shifts (assuming spots are
positioned symmetrically around the zero order). As shown in
figure 5, for a small number of pixels there are some variations
in the intensity of the output spots (this is shown as increased
efficiency). Note that the most unfair situation is when using
only three pixels on the temporary hologram. In this case, one
of the two spots becomes more significant in the DBS and the
resulting grating resembles more a blazed grating; thus it has
increased efficiency. The same issue appears for 5 and 7 pixels
because, again, it is an odd number and it is more likely that
one of the two spots will be favoured. When the number of
A Georgiou et al
Minimum
Maximum
Mean
20 25 30 35 40 45 50
temporary pixels increases beyond 10, the efficiency variation
(and thus the spot’s intensities) have their expected value, and
the power is fairly distributed.
The worst case scenario is when the hologram creates
only two spots. Then there is only one distance between the
two random pixels and this is more likely to be an integer
number of spatial periods. After performing many hologram
designs, it was found that using 4–5 times more temporary
pixels was sufficient for the purpose of the algorithm. This
virtually eliminates any problems in the optimization that may
arise due to the distance between temporary pixels.
3.2. Temporary hologram calculation
The second step in the OPPO algorithm is the optimization of
the temporary hologram. The temporary hologram is treated as
a normal hologram, but its pixels are not on a regular grid. All
temporary pixels are treated as point sources.
The DBS is used to optimize the temporary hologram.
Random changes are made on the phase of the pixels and the
‘quality’ of the reconstruction plane is observed. If the quality
improves, the change is accepted; if not, the change is rejected.
The ‘quality’ of the reconstruction plane is measured by
the cost function, and the aim of the DBS is to minimize it.
Most cost functions have a number of inputs but only one
output that determines the decision taken. In this particular
case, the cost function accepts as input the electric fields of the
spots E 1 to E S , and is equal to

S
1
CF = − |E i | Q (3)
i=1
where Q is a real number (preferably an integer, to accelerate
computation) larger than unity. For this work Q = 10.
The power factor Q1 assists the algorithm into distributing
the power fairly into the spots. Increasing the amplitude of
strong spots has a smaller effect than increasing the amplitude
of the weak spots. If a more strict scheme is required, the cost
function may be multiplied by the intensity of the weakest spot
or divided by the intensity of the strongest. These schemes
ensure fairness between spots but it may be at the expense of
lower optical efficiency.
4
J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 (2008) 015306
Amplitude Variation of the Output Spots
0.07
0.06
0.05
pdf(Iout)
0.04
0.03
0.02
0.01
0
0.34 0.36 0.38
Figure 6. An ideal two-spot-generating hologram forms two spots with intensities of 0.405. In practice the DBS part of the OPPO algorithm
introduces some minor unfairness; thus the spots do not have the exact amplitude. Therefore the above distribution of intensities is introduced.
This variance may be reduced by using more complex cost functions.
3.3. Output plane phase
The third step of the algorithm is the measurement of the phase
of the output ports. This information is already available during
the DBS optimization of the hologram. It may be recalculated
if it is suspected that the rounding errors of the DBS are
significant.
3.4. Inverse Fourier transform computation
The final step in the OPPO algorithm is to use the inverse
DFT to compute the original hologram. The hologram plane
will have some amplitude modulation which is then removed.
It can be shown analytically that once the optimum phase of
the output spots is calculated, the phase of the inverse Fourier
transform gives the hologram that will route maximum power
to the output spots [12].
The DFT is a computationally demanding process (it
requires N × N × S computations) but in the OPPO algorithm
it is performed only once. Its speed may be further improved
by using a parallel processor because the value of each pixel
is affected only by the phases of the output spots. It may
well be possible to be computed in distributed processors
behind pixels. In such a scheme, the addressing lines
of the LCOS device may be replaced with a bus carrying
the information containing the phase and position of the
spots. This, potentially, would allow a simple bus to send
all the information required to the pixel-based processors,
thus improving the speed and complexity of the device and
replacing the addressing lines with a common bus carrying the
phases of the output spots.
4. Results
4.1. Hologram plane
The performance of the OPPO algorithm was evaluated
by comparing theoretical results and results from the DBS
algorithm. Three metrics were used to judge the performance
of the OPPO algorithm: efficiency, spot variance and hologram
plane appearance. Most of the results are based on a two-spot-
generating hologram, where the amplitude of the spots can
be found analytically to be sinc2 ( π2 ) and the efficiency twice
5
A Georgiou et al
0.4 0.42 0.44 0.46
Iout
that. For the hologram plane appearance a four-spot-generating
hologram was designed using both OPPO and DBS algorithms.
In order to determine the efficiency of the OPPO algo-
rithm, 5000 two-spot-generating holograms were computed us-
ing the proposed algorithm. The number of pixels on the tem-
porary hologram was varied from 2 to 50, and for each case the
maximum, minimum and mean efficiency of the algorithm was
plotted against the number of pixels of the temporary hologram
(see figure 5). From this figure it can be seen that (i) the effi-
ciency is virtually the same as the ideal efficiency, and (ii) the
efficiency changes very little for temporary holograms with 10
or more pixels.
The average efficiency achieved was actually 0.05% more
than the ideal efficiency. Note that the ideal efficiency gives a
lower limit (equal to 81%), and it is possible to have more than
the ideal efficiency [1, 12]. For a small number of pixels on the
temporary hologram (less than 10) efficiencies were achieved
of 2% more than the ideal one. This occurs in holograms which
form two spots of unequal intensity in which case the hologram
resembles more a blazed grating that has 100% efficiency.
The spot variance was measured by plotting the intensities
of the spots formed by the 5000 holograms on a probability
density function plot. This shows the intensity of the spot,
Iout , and its probability of occurrence. Ideally the probability
density function should be an impulse at sinc2 ( π2 ) = 0.405.
From figure 6 it can be seen that there is a small variance on
the intensity of the spots. This is equivalent to 99% of the spots
having only 5% error on their expected value.
The final test for the OPPO algorithm was to compare
it with DBS. A number of spot-generating holograms were
designed with different characteristics, and in all cases the
performance of the OPPO algorithm was either the same as
or better than DBS. Figure 7 shows two four-spot-generating
holograms computed using the two algorithms. The spots were
positioned randomly around the zero order. The hologram
had 256 × 256 pixels, and 256 phase levels. As the OPPO
algorithm computes an analogue phase hologram, the value of
it was rounded to the nearest 1/256 after the inverse DFT. The
efficiency loss associated with this phase quantization can be
ignored because it is very small (about 0.005% power loss);
therefore phase quantization can be safely disregarded as a
factor affecting efficiency.
J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 10 (2008) 015306
OPPO algorithm (eff=81.5%) DBS algorithm (eff=81.2%)
Figure 7. The holograms designed by the OPPO and DBS
algorithms. The computation time for the OPPO algorithm was
below 2 s while the DBS was run for 271 s to achieve similar
efficiency.
4.2. Computation speed
The holograms calculated using OPPO algorithm had equal or
better performance than the DBS holograms. In the particular
example of figure 7, the OPPO algorithm computed hologram
was slightly more efficient than the DBS one. The computation
time for the OPPO was less than 2 s. DBS achieved 10%
efficiency in 2 s, 50% efficiency in 10 s and 81.2% in 271 s
(computation was performed on a Pentium Duo 1.86 GHz
processor).
The OPPO algorithm requires computation for designing
the temporary hologram using DBS (about κNp × p ×
S × 5 S complex operations) and the computation of the
hologram using DFT ( S × N 2 complex operations). The total
computation is then
tOPPO = 5κNp × p × S 2 + S × N 2 .
If N = 256, S = 32, p = 8 and κNp is set to its minimum
value of unity, then
tOPPO = 0.04 × 106 + 2.1 × 106 ;
thus the computation of designing the temporary hologram
may be ignored. Then the speed of OPPO relative to DBS is
tDBS
≈ κNp × p ≈ 8.
tOPPO
In practice κNp is a function of both N and p and will increase
for larger holograms. Also devices are more likely to have
more than eight phase levels. Thus it can be deduced with
certainty that OPPO will be at least 10 times faster than DBS
for most cases.
5. Conclusions
Spot-generating holograms are employed in many applications,
including telecommunication systems and optical tweezers.
View publication stats
A Georgiou et al
Despite the developments in the speed of computation, a
major issue in the use of reconfigurable holograms remains
their real-time computation. In this paper a computationally
efficient algorithm, the output plane phase optimization
(OPPO) algorithm, was presented. The OPPO algorithm is
capable of computing phase-only spot-generating holograms
many times faster than any other known algorithm. It operates
by optimizing the phase of the output plane, which has a
significantly smaller number of variables compared to the
hologram plane. This algorithm is best suited to systems
in which a hologram with many pixels is used while the
output plane has only a small number of spots. The only
computationally intensive operation of the OPPO algorithm is
the inverse DFT, may be performed in parallel in the silicon
backplane of an LCOS device, accelerating the computation
and simplifying the addressing. In general the OPPO algorithm
computes holograms with equal or better characteristics than
DBS, at least 10 times faster, while allowing the computation
to be performed in parallel.
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