Benchmarking Coding Standards for Digital Holography represented on the Object Plane

Digital holography is a growing field that owes its success to the provided three-dimensional imaging representation. This is achieved by encoding the wave field transmitted or scattered by an object in the form of an interference pattern with a reference beam. While in conventional imaging systems it is usually impossible to recover the correct focused image from a defocused one, with digital holography the image can be numerically retrieved at any distance from the hologram. Digital holography also allows the reconstruction of multiple objects at different depths. The complex object field at the hologram plane can be separated on real and imaginary, or amplitude and phase components for further compression. It could be inferred that more inter-component redundancies exist in real and imaginary information than in the amplitude and phase information. Also, several compression schemes, like lossless compression, lossy compression, based on subsampling, quantization, and transformation, mainly using wavelets were considered. The benchmark of the main available image coding standard solutions like JPEG, JPEG 2000, and the intra coding modes available on MPEG-2, H264/AVC and HEVC video codecs were also analyzed for digital holographic data compression on the hologram plane. In the current work, the benchmark of the main available image coding standard solutions JPEG, JPEG-XT, JPEG 2000 and the intra mode of HEVC, are performed for digital holographic data represented on the object plane, instead of the hologram plane. This study considers Real-Imaginary and Amplitude-Phase representations. As expected Real, Imaginary and Amplitude information present very similar compression performance and are coded very efficiently with the different standards. However, the phase information requires much higher bitrates (3/4 bpp more) to reach similar quality levels. Moreover, the Amplitude information results in slightly larger bitrates for the same quality level than real or imaginary information. Comparing the different standards, the HEVC intra main coding profile is a very efficient model and outperforms the other standards. Furthermore, JPEG 2000 results in very similar compression performance. A comparison with studies where coding was performed on the hologram plane will reveal the advantages of coding on the object plane. Hence, becomes evident that future representation standards should consider the representation of digital holograms on the object plane instead of the hologram plane.