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Any motion of the scene during the exposure of a hologram results in a spatial modulation of the recorded fringe contrast. On reconstruction, this produces a spatial amplitude modulation of the reconstructed wavefront, which results in blurring of the image not unlike that of a conventional photograph. The concept of motion holography has been aptly described theoretically by D. B. Neumann. This paper presents and discusses the experimental investigation of a new holographic technique that allows resolution of front surface detail for scene velocities on the order of 9 x 10(5) cm/sec.

A new holographic technique has been developed that allows the resolution of front surface detail to be holographically recorded from a scene having a relatively large total motion during the exposure, i.e., the total motion of the scene during the exposure is large, relative to the allowed path length change of the signal beam. The new technique has been employed as a holographic camera and consequently produced the first real-time, true three-dimensional motion picture of a moving scene with resolution of front surface detail [R. L. Kurtz and L. M. Perry, Appl. Opt. 12, 888 (1973)]. A composite of this technique provides for the moving scene to have a randomly oriented velocity vector. Evidence of the maximum allowable total scene motion for a single velocity component is provided where the laser source was a continuous wave argon laser.