Compression of multiple 3D color scenes with experimental recording and reconstruction

Abstract

We present for the first time a method for compression of 3D color scenes with experimental recording and reconstruction, including scene multiplexing. An experimental setup allows separately registering three off-axis Fourier holograms corresponding to the RGB color channels of a 3D scene. Then, the optical field data contained in each hologram is extracted and their phase is retained. The phases associated to each color channel are spatially arranged to get a single phase-only optical field for the experimental full color reconstruction in another optical setup. This process is then further developed to include different 3D color scenes by multiplying the arranged phase-only optical fields corresponding to each scene by complementary binary masks. Three sampled scenes are multiplexed giving a compression in the data volume up to 97.81% in our experiments. The technique used in the context of multiplexing allows a substantial data volume reduction and the appropriate reconstruction of each color scene without cross-talk and in a single step.