Progressive hologram transmission using a view-dependent scalable compression scheme

Abstract

Over the last few years, holography has been emerging as an alternative to stereoscopic imaging since it provides users with the most realistic and comfortable three-dimensional (3D) experience. However, high-quality holograms enabling a free-viewpoint visualization contain tremendous amount of data. Therefore, a user willing to access to a remote hologram repository would face high downloading time, even with high speed networks. To reduce transmission time, a joint viewpoint-quality scalable compression scheme is proposed. At the encoder side, the hologram is first decomposed into a sparse set of diffracted light rays using Matching Pursuit over a Gabor atoms dictionary. Then, the atoms corresponding to a given user’s viewpoint are selected to form a sub-hologram. Finally, the pruned atoms are sorted and encoded according to their importance for the reconstructed view. The proposed approach allows a progressive decoding of the sub-hologram from the first received atom. Streaming simulations for a moving user reveal that our approach outperforms conventional scalable codecs such as scalable H.265 and enables a practical streaming with a better quality of experience.