Superresolved phase-shifting Gabor holography by CCD shift

Holography in the Gabor regime is restricted to weak diffraction assumptions. Otherwise, diffraction prevents an accurate recovery of the object's complex wavefront. We have recently proposed a modified Gabor-like setup to extend Gabor's concept to any sample provided that it be non-diffusive. However, the resolution of the final image becomes limited as a consequence of the additional elements considered in the proposed setup. In this paper we present an experimental approach to overcome such a limitation in which the former configuration is used while the CCD camera is shifted to different off-axis positions in order to generate a synthetic aperture. Thus, once the whole image set is recorded and digitally processed for each camera position, we merge the resulting band-pass images into one image by assembling a synthetic aperture. Finally, a superresolved image is recovered by Fourier transformation of the information contained in the generated synthetic aperture. Experimental results validate our concepts for a gain in resolution of close to 2.