Holography is a well-established imaging technique. Since its discovery by Denis Gabor in 1947 [GAB48, GAB49, GAB51, GAB66] who was awarded the Nobel price in physics in 1971, large developments have been carried out. A description of the different forms and applications of classical holography is already developed in details in several books [GOO68, HAR96, COLL71, HAN79, STR69, SMI69, FRA87]. Furthermore, an exhaustive list of historical papers and an interesting overview of the developments of holography from its discovery to the present can be found in E.N. Leith's overview [LEITH97]. It is however important to mention that even if digital holography took a great importance in the last years, holography progresses in non digital or more classical holography cannot be reduced to 3D spectacular "art images". Research launched in the 50s and 60s by several famous personalities as D. Gabor, E.N. Leith, A. Lohmann, R.J. Collier, J. Upatnieks, G. Stroke, N. Hartman, Yu. N. Denisyuk, S. Benton, R.F. Vanligte, J.W. Goodman, R. Dändliker and N. Abramson, emerge onto a lot of different applications such as holographic data storage [SHEL97, ORT03], photorefractive crystals hologram capture [ROO03], light-in-flight for ultrafast phenomena recording [YAMA05], metrology applications, TV holography [POO05] and so on. Furthermore, all aspects of holography is a source of inspiration for the development of digital holography. For example, the configuration for DHM presented by E. Cuche [CUC99b] and used in this work was presented for the first time in 1966 by R.F. VanLighten and H. Oserberg [VAN66].
Concerning digital holography, the first computer reconstructions of holograms go back to the late sixties, some twenty years after the publication of Gabor's landmark papers. The idea was proposed for the first time in 1967 by J.W. Goodman and R.W. Laurence [GOO67]. Numerical hologram reconstructions were initiated in the early 1970s by M.A. Kronrod and L.P. Yaroslavsky [KRO72a, KRO72b]. Nevertheless, the holograms were still recorded on a photographic plate, developed, optically enlarged and finally sampled before being numerically reconstructed.

A complete digital holographic set-up in sense of digital recording and reconstruction was achieved first by Coquoz et al. [COQ92, COQ93a, COQ93b] followed by U. Schnars and W. Jüptner in 1994 [SCHN94a]. The introduction of a coupled charged device (CCD) camera to record Fresnel holograms suppresses the recording on media such as photographic plate, photopolymers and photorefractives. It allows faster acquisition and reconstruction rates, as well as larger flexibility.