Improvement of the size estimation of 3D tracked droplets using digital in-line holography with joint estimation reconstruction

Digital holography is a valuable tool for three-dimensional information extraction. Among existing configurations, the originally proposed set-up (i.e. Gabor, or in-line holography), is reasonably immune to variations in the experimental environment making it a method of choice for studies of fluid dynamics. Nevertheless, standard hologram reconstruction techniques, based on numerical light back-propagation are prone to artifacts such as twin images or aliases that limit both the quality and quantity of information extracted from the acquired holograms. To get round this issue, the hologram reconstruction as a parametric inverse problem has been shown to accurately estimate 3D positions and the size of seeding particles directly from the hologram. To push the bounds of accuracy on size estimation still further, we propose to fully exploit the information redundancy of a hologram video sequence using joint estimation reconstruction. Applying this approach in a bench-top experiment, we show that it led to a relative precision of 0.13% (for a 60 mu m diameter droplet) for droplet size estimation, and a tracking precision of sigma(x) x sigma(y) x sigma(z)= 0.15 x 0.15 x 1 pixels.