Digital holographic micro-interferometry of nonradiative transitions in biological specimens

Digital holography is widely used nowadays for interferometric studies of various objects and processes. However, peculiarities of objects under study often imply difficulties in holograms recording, reconstruction and processing. One of the major factors is a typically large number of singular points at phase distributions caused by either low signal to noise ratio at the recorded holograms or sample inhomogeneities. The basic operations applied for absolute phase extracting from digital holograms are noise filtration, phase unwrapping and subtraction of phase distributions. In this paper we demonstrate that the sequence of these operations may drastically affect the resulting image quality and the data obtained. An optimized algorithm suitable for studies of dynamic processes in biological media on microscopic level has been developed. The algorithm was applied for monitoring of nonradiative deactivation processes occurring in onion cell specimens at photosensitized generation of singlet oxygen.