Conventional 'numerical reconstruction for digital holography using a filter applied in the spatial frequency domain to eztract the primanJ image may yield suboptimal image quality because of the loss in highfrequency components and interference from other undesirable terms of a hologram. In this paper, we propose a new numerical reconstruction approach using a statistical technique. This approach reconstmcts the complex field of the object from the real-valued hologram intensity data. Because

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... olographic image reconstruction is an ill-posed problem, our statistical technique is based on penalized-likelihood estimation. we develop a Poisson statistical model for this problem and derive an optimization transfer algorithm that monotonically decreases the cost function each itemtion. 5'imulation:results show that OUT statistical technique has the potential to improve image quality in digital holography relative to conventional reconstruction techniques. 0-7803-8104-1/03/$17.00 02003 IEEE