Digital holography enables 3D imagery after processing frequency-diverse stacks of 2D coherent images obtained from a chirped-frequency illuminator. To compensate for object motion or vibration, a constant temporal frequency or “pilot tone” illuminator can act as a reference for each chirped frequency. This paper examines speckle decorrelation between the chirped and pilot tone illuminators and its effect on the resultant range images. We show that speckle decorrelation between the two illuminators is more severe for facets of the object’s surface that are more highly sloped, relative to the optical axis, and that this decorrelation results in noise in the range images in the areas of the object that are highly sloped. We examine the severity of this noise as a function of several imaging parameters and show that post-processing apodization, effectively reducing bandwidth, in the temporal frequency domain can reduce this noise.
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