Low-complexity compression of holograms based on delta modulation

Past research has demonstrated that hologram of a real world object can be acquired by scanning it with a single two-dimensional optical scan. The technology commonly referred to as optical scanning holography (OSH), have found important applications such as in microscopy, pattern recognition, 3D holographic display, and optical remote sensing. As holograms are often employed to capture three dimensional objects with high resolution, large amount of data is required to represent them. In this paper we propose a method for compressing holograms based on Delta modulation. Specifically, we apply our proposed method for holograms captured by OSH. Experimental evaluation reveals that our proposed approach is capable of attaining a compression ratio of 64 times, and still preserves favorable fidelity on the reconstructed images. In addition, both the encoding and decoding processes of the proposed method are very low in complexity, hence enabling real-time operation. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.