Development of advanced digital holographic microscopy for studying microscale and biological cell flows

Digital holographic microscopy has been demonstrated as a label-free, low-cost, compact, yet powerful tool for 3D imaging of micron-sized objects at high frame rates. However, the standard reconstruction method suffers from poor axial spatial resolution that causes large uncertainty in the axial localization. To mitigate this limitation, this thesis presents a novel methodology which allows for unambiguous 3D localization and extraction of the object field from the standard reconstruction volume. The presented methodology has been validated both numerically and experimentally as well as implemented to measure instantaneous three-component three-dimensional velocity fields and 3D tracking of bacteria cells.