Multiple description coding of digital holograms using Maximum-a-Posteriori

Holography is deemed the ultimate 3D [1]. Holographic displays provide full eye accommodation, thus not causing eye strain or headaches which are an inconvenient side-effect of 3D stereo [2][3]. As the etymological meaning of Holography suggests, digital holograms store full 3D information of the recorded object (including multiple views). For that reason, storage and transmission of digital holographic video requires high bandwidth. Considering that current high-speed communication cables cannot provide enough bandwidth for the realtime transmission of holographic video, it is not unrealistic to assume that in the future the transmission of realtime holographic video might require more than one transmission channel. In that case, one can take advantage of multiple description coding (MDC) for optimally coding data between available channels and mitigate channel errors. We present a MDC solution for transmission of holographic video from a computer host to a holographic display device using two transmission channels. To our knowledge, there are no reports of previous works regarding the MDC of digital holograms. Because digital holograms are inherently different from regular images [4], the proposed work is novel on its own. Furthermore, since the holographic format is a direct result of the physical phenomena, the holographic format will not change in the future; allowing the presented work to be a contribution for future holographic displaying technology.