General Theory of Holography*

Abstract

In this paper I propose a method of analysis general enough to encompass all proposed forms of holography, including coherent, incoherent, and modulated incoherent. The analysis shows that a coherent source is the only one giving uniformly good results on the basis of signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. For incoherent and modulated incoherent sources the S/N ratio decreases as 1/N½, where N is the number of coherent elements in the source.