Holography: an interpretation from the phase-space point of view

The formation of holograms is interpreted as the consequence of the bilinearity of the ambiguity function. Reconstruction can then be regarded as the manipulation of the ambiguity function. Specifically, we show that in the case of in-line holography, the reconstruction can be regarded as phase tomography. In this way we provide a unified picture for the formulation of both noninterferometric and interferometric phase-retrieval techniques.