Digital holography: Benchmarking coding standards and representation formats
Holography is an emerging technology to represent and display visual information and the associated experience expectations on the layman imaginary are huge. A hologram is a reproduction of a light field represented through the interference pattern between two wavefields, the reference and object wavefields. Holograms may be optically generated from real objects or computationally generated from synthetic objects leading to the so-called computer generated holograms. Whatever the creation process, holograms may have a digital representation using some appropriate representation format. Moreover, considering the huge amounts of data involved, digital holographic data has to be compressed using appropriate coding solutions, possibly available standard coding solutions. Finally, the decoded holographic data has to lead to reconstructed images using some appropriate reconstruction method. Holographic data coding is an emerging field of research where literature is still very scarce. In this context, before starting designing coding solutions considering the specific characteristics of holographic data, it is essential to assess the current compression performance associated to the most relevant available standard coding solutions and alternative representations formats. This paper has the main objective to benchmark the most relevant available standard coding solutions and the main alternative representation formats under meaningful test conditions and for the test material currently available. This assessment is critical to understand the current status quo and launch future research.