Experimental holographic movie compression using optical scaling and sampling

Abstract

The digital recording of high-quality holograms requires the use of high-resolution recording mediums, resulting in large amounts of data that must be stored and processed. In order to reduce the amount of information to be managed, we propose and implement a compression protocol for holographic movies. We perform a holographic video recording using an off-axis Fourier hologram setup. The individual holograms corresponding to each frame of the movie are processed to obtain the optical field data (OFD) that allows the full scene reconstruction. Then, we process the OFDs with our compression protocol, which is based on the combination of an optical scaling procedure, positioning, sampling with binary random masks and multiplexing. Application of this protocol results in a single package with all the processed frames containing the full compressed video. As a proof of concept, we apply our protocol to an experimentally recorded movie of a rotating 3D object, achieving a compression of 87.5% compared to OFDs and 99.0% compared to raw holograms. Finally, a comparison between the proposed protocol and the JPEG compression format is included. We add the complete description of the procedure along with experimental results supporting the proposed protocol.