A systematic approach to TV holography

Television holography (TVH) can be defined as `the family of optical measurement techniques based on the electronic recording and processing of holograms'. Image-plane TVH was introduced in the early 1970s with the name `electronic speckle-pattern interferometry' (ESPI). Since then, TVH has undergone an impressive development and become one of the most promising optical techniques for non-destructive testing and industrial inspection. The aim of this review is to propose an original scheme for the systematic treatment of TVH and to review the existing techniques according to it. In this approach we split the measurement process into four highly independent stages (illumination and observation geometry, temporal treatment, secondary-correlogram generation and fringe-pattern analysis) and establish a common notation to formulate the corresponding techniques. Such a strategy allows the free combination of the techniques proposed for each stage as building blocks to obtain every particular variant of the whole TVH measurement process, whether it has already been reported or not, and also the incorporation of new techniques while retaining compatibility with the existing variants of the previous and following stages.