Efficient compression of digital holograms for Internet transmission of three-dimensional images

Summary form only given. Digital holography has seen renewed interest with the recent development of megapixel digital sensors with high spatial resolution and dynamic range. We record digital holograms using a technique called phase-shift interferometry. Each hologram encodes multiple views of the object from a small range of angles. As with conventional holography, a particular view of the object can be reconstructed by extracting the appropriate window of pixels from the hologram and applying a numerical propagation technique. A real-time optical reconstruction technique has also been demonstrated. Our holograms have dimensions of 2028 /spl times/ 2044 pixels and in their native format require 16 bytes for each real-imaginary pair. We describe methods to compress these holograms for more efficient storage and transmission.