Digital holographic microscopy: our contributions to its democratization

Abstract

In this work, the contributions that the research group of Optics and Opto-Digital Processing have developed to democratize digital holographic microscopy (DHM) are reviewed. The said group, based on the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellin, has focused its work on developing tools, both of software and hardware, for DHM architectures, both without and with lenses, with the aim of making these cutting-edge technologies of microscopy accessible to many people. Cost- effective hardware designs, open-source processing software, and user-friendly modeling platforms are the main contributions of our research group to the democratization of DHM. The fundamentals of DHM, both without and with lenses, are briefly recalled to introduce the above-mentioned review.