Video-rate wavefront capture and replay via single-shot reference-free measurement: toward holographic telepresence

We present a reference-free holographic telepresence framework that captures and replays the complex optical wavefront of a three-dimensional scene from a single intensity speckle measurement. A pre-characterized geometric phase diffuser encodes the incident field into a deterministic speckle pattern, enabling reference-free acquisition through a calibrated, invertible forward model. The wavefront is recovered via scattering-matrix inversion with smoothed amplitude flow and Nesterov acceleration, and directly projected onto a spatial light modulator for holographic replay. This measurement-driven pipeline eliminates interferometric reference beams and multi-frame acquisition, enabling single-shot operation at video rate (~28 fps) with sub-gigabit bandwidth. We experimentally demonstrate volumetric refocusing and dynamic three-dimensional reconstruction, confirming that the recovered field preserves physically consistent propagation behavior. Although image quality is currently limited by coherent speckle, both experiments and simulations show systematic improvement with temporal averaging and system scaling. These results establish real-time, measurement-based wavefront capture and replay as a viable and complementary approach to model-based holographic telepresence.