<a href="http://www.digitalholography.eu/">REAL3D</a> is a digital holography project funded by the EU and brings together nine participants from academia and industry under the <a href="http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html">FP7</a>.

As part of the project Nitesh Pandey, Damien Kelly, Bryan Hennelly and Thomas Naughton from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth demonstrate utilizing <a href="http://eprints.nuim.ie/2408/1/TN_Pre-computation-Fresnel_PHKN2009c.pdf">pre-computation and quantization of chirp matrices</a> with GPUs running Jacket from AccelerEyes speeds up the reconstructions of digital holograms.

<a href="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Speedup-e1303967471750.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1251" title="Speedup" src="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Speedup-e1303967471750.png" alt="" width="600" height="300" /></a>

Digital holography is a powerful imaging technique with many new applications like true 3D display. It allows the capture of both amplitude and phase information of the light reflected off the surface of 3D objects. Researchers at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth are developing techniques based on digital holography for 3D display applications.

Reconstruction of large digital holograms can be computationally intensive to generate on CPUs, but GPUs running Jacket offer amazing possibilities.

Here’s how it works:

<a href="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DH_schematic_accel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1256" title="DH_schematic_accel" src="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DH_schematic_accel.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="250" /></a>

Check out the reconstruction on video:

<center><iframe width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EjEk52I_UKk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center>

The movie shows the propagation of a digital hologram from the camera plane to the object plane.
They run Fresnel transforms employing the Fourier Transform algorithm on an “ordinary computer” with these two set-ups:
<ol>
	<li>CPU: Intel Pentium 4, 3.0GHz, 1GB RAM</li>
	<li>GPU: NVIDIA GeForce with AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2.31GHz, 2GB RAM</li>
</ol>
Here’s the set-up:

<a href="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Exp_setup_accel.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1273" title="Exp_setup_accel" src="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Exp_setup_accel.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="192" /></a>

Now check out the execution time comparison between CPUs and GPUs:

<a href="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Execution-Times-e1303970496905.png"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1274" title="Execution Times" src="http://blog.accelereyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Execution-Times-e1303970496905.png" alt="" width="600" height="300" /></a>

Without a doubt, GPUs running Jacket get your holograms reconstructed faster. The speedups get better and better as your hologram size increases. Precomputed chirp matrixes speed up your reconstructions as well. And when GPUs running Jacket combine with the precomputed chirp matrixes on larger holograms the speedups just get better. It’s like a gift that keeps on giving.

Special thanks to Nitesh Pandey, Damien Kelly, Bryan Hennelly and Thomas Naughton from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth for all their awesome work. We all love holograms. We also want to thank the EU’s <a href="http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/home_en.html">FP7</a> for funding the <a href="http://www.digitalholography.eu/">REAL3D</a> project. They folks are doing outstanding work we are so happy to see there is funding to help them continue to create greatness.