Wave atoms for digital hologram compression

Compression of macroscopic digital holograms is a major research problem, which if unresolved will continue to limit the possible applications of holography in multimedia contexts. The quest of searching for the most suitable representation for compression is still an open problem. In this work, we study sparsification by the wave atom transform, introduced in 2006 by Demanet et al., and experiment on four large-scale representative diffuse macroscopic holograms while testing compressibility in the object plane, Fourier plane, and defocused plane representations, respectively. We demonstrate that it is a suitable nonadaptive, sparsifying transform for Fourier or defocused content, and by integration into the wave atom coding (WAC) method, we sketch a full-fledged codec for the compression of macroscopic holograms. WAC is compared to two variants of JPEG 2000, with equal complexity of coding tools, and the more recent High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC). For Fourier and defocused holograms, WAC outperforms the JPEG 2000 variants by 0.9–7.9 dB Bjontegaard-Delta peak signal to noise ratio, especially in the former case, while it is as good as or better than even H.265/HEVC for very deep computer-generated holograms, thus improving on existing approaches.