Cascaded diffractive optical elements for improved multiplane image reconstruction.

Computer-generated phase-only diffractive optical elements in a cascaded setup are designed by one deterministic and one stochastic algorithm for multiplane image formation. It is hypothesized that increasing the number of elements as wavefront modulators in the longitudinal dimension would enlarge the available solution space, thus enabling enhanced image reconstruction. Numerical results show that increasing the number of holograms improves quality at the output. Design principles, computational methods, and specific conditions are discussed.