Open access database for experimental validations of holographic compression engines

Holography allows for both the recording and reproduction of wavefields of light, and is thereby able to fully capture the three-dimensional structure of objects. The appearance of the object will change according to the position and orientation of the viewer, providing an immersive experience as if objects are actually present. Moreover, holograms have many applications in metrology such as microscopy and interferometry. Because holograms represent interference patterns, they possess significantly different signal properties from natural photography and video; this will make conventional image encoders perform sub-optimally on holograms. Therefore, new data compression techniques have to be evaluated for this type of data. One important requirement for comparing and evaluating various codecs is to have reference holograms which are publicly available. For this purpose, we have set up an open public database containing a set of computer-generated holograms. Furthermore, we evaluate the performances of two JPEG 2000-based coders, which were modified to better cope with holographic data.