Correction of anisoplanatic phase errors in digital holography

The quality of coherent images computed from digital holography or heterodyne array data is sensitive to phase errors of the reference and/or object beams. A number of algorithms exist for correcting phase errors in or very near the hologram plane. In the case of phase errors introduced a nonnegligible distance away from hologram plane, the resulting imagery exhibits anisoplanatism. A feature of coherent imaging is that such phase errors may be corrected by simply propagating the aberrated fields (from the object) from the hologram plane to the plane where the phase errors were introduced and applying the phase-error correction algorithms to the fields in that plane. We present experimental results that demonstrate correction of such anisoplanatic phase errors.