Viewing angle dependent coding of digital holograms

Abstract

In this work, an interactive digital hologram transmission algorithm is proposed based on the user's viewing direction. Digital hologram is a digital image yielding the depth information of 3D object, where a local region of sub-hologram is associated with a specific viewing direction to observe the 3D object. Therefore, in server-client communication environments, a client requests the viewing angles associated with a specific viewing direction, and the server adaptively transmits the sub-hologram data according to the client's request. In practice, since the digital hologram is generally a noise-like image, the object image is encoded instead which is numerically reconstructed from digital hologram. Moreover, H.264/AVC intra-only coding scheme is used to increase the coding gain of reconstructed images. It was shown that the proposed viewing angle dependent coding algorithm more effectively exploit the transmission bandwidth compared with the conventional viewing angle independent coding method.