INTERFERE, Short-Time Fourier Transform based compression of complex-valued holograms with bit-depth and range-adaptive quantization

With digital holographic display and recording setups steadily improving and the advent of realistic super-high-resolution holograms (>100 megapixels), the efficient compression of digital holograms (DHs) becomes an urgent matter. Therefore, JPEG Pleno holography is undergoing a standardization effort to address this challenge. The accepted, current baseline coding solution for lossy compression of complex-valued DHs, entitled INTERFERE, is presented in this paper. Its features include a simple and modular overall architecture, high scalability, view-selective coding, low decoder complexity, and the highest rate-distortion performance among state-of-the-art solutions. We also introduce, to our knowledge, a novel meta-quantization strategy that can be used for signals exhibiting large variations in dynamic range in the domain being quantized. We were able to demonstrate on the versatile JPEG Pleno hologram database BD-rate reductions between 16% and 272% (average of 119%) over HEVC for achieving an SNR in the range 5–25 dB. With this first compression standard on DHs, we hope to provide an essential building block for their future commercialization in large-scale consumer markets.