Abstract

We compress phase-shift digital holograms (whole Fresnel fields) for the transmission of three-dimensional images. For real-time networking applications, the time required to compress can be as critical as compression rate. We achieve lossy compression through quantization of both the real and imaginary streams, followed by a bit packing operation. Compression losses in the reconstructed objects were quantified. We define a speedup metric that combines space gains due to compression with temporal overheads due to compression routine and transmission serialization. We empirically verify transmission speedup due to compression, using a special-purpose Internet-based networking application.