HORN-9: Special-purpose computer for electroholography with the Hilbert transform

Abstract

Holography is a technology that uses light interference and diffraction to record and reproduce three-dimensional (3D) information. Using computers, holographic 3D scenes (electroholography) have been widely studied. Nevertheless, its practical application requires enormous computing power, and current computers have limitations in real-time processing. In this study, we show that holographic reconstruction (HORN)-9, a special-purpose computer for electroholography with the Hilbert transform, can compute a 1, 920 × 1, 080-pixel computer-generated hologram from a point cloud of 65,000 points in 0.030 s (33 fps) on a single card. This performance is 8, 7, and 170 times more efficient than a previously developed HORN-8, a graphics processing unit, and a central processing unit (CPU), respectively. We also demonstrated the real-time processing and display of 400,000 points on multiple HORN-9s, achieving an acceleration of 600 times with four HORN-9 units compared with a single CPU.