Wavefront diffraction by a structured-light pattern

Subject of the study . Research was conducted to develop approaches for efficient compression of holographic data as a means of addressing the inherent contradiction between the huge volume of information contained in holograms and the limited radio spectrum available. Purpose of the work . An efficient data compression method was developed that will enable transmission of all information necessary for synthesis of a hologram and subsequent restoration of a 3D image with high spatial resolution, television frame rate, and continuous parallax at the receiving end of a communications link having the bandwidth of a standard television channel. Method . By making the transition from traditional entropy coding to utilizing a holographic diffractive structure, the authors previously managed to achieve compression ratios as high as the required five to six orders of magnitude by representing the 3D signal using a 2D height map and a 2D surface texture. This paper demonstrates a method for compressing the height map information by another two orders of magnitude. Main results . It is shown that it is possible to compress the data contained in the height map by an additional two orders of magnitude. Practical significance . Our results indicate that all the necessary information can be transmitted within the bandwidth of a standard television signal, supporting transmission of the height map with an additional two bytes for each line of the 3D image texture frame. This is equivalent to a slight increase in the housekeeping data transmitted at the end of each line or the introduction of an additional column in each television frame.