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Digital holography is a growing field that owes its success to the provided three-dimensional imaging representation. This is achieved by encoding the wave field transmitted or scattered by an object in the form of an interference pattern with a reference beam. While in conventional imaging systems it is usually impossible to recover the correct focused image from a defocused one, with digital holography the image can be numerically retrieved at any distance from the hologram. Digital holography also allows the reconstruction of multiple objects at different depths. In a previous study, the benchmark of the main available image coding standard solutions JPEG, JPEG-XT, JPEG 2000 and the HEVC intra mode was performed for digital holographic data represented on the object plane. The HEVC intra main coding profile outperforms the other standards while JPEG 2000 results in very similar compression performance. In the current work, a scheme based on the HEVC intra mode codec for holographic information compression on the object plane is proposed. In the base layer, a 2D version of the object (amplitude information on object plane) is coded with HEVC intra main coding profile. Previously was observed that the phase information requires much higher bit rates than the amplitude information, as standardized codecs are not adapted for the compression of this type of information. In this paper we propose a model where the amplitude information is encoded with the HEVC intra mode codec, while the phase is represented by encoding the real information and the signal of the imaginary information. The real information is also encoded using the HEVC intra mode as it already revealed appropriate for compression of this type of information. The imaginary information signal is encoded with JBIG. The advantage of this scheme is that the amplitude information provides a direct 2D representation of the hologram while the phase information can be considered as a 3D enhancement layer. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the state of the art in holography compression, while allowing compatibility with the current standards and direct 2D visualization.
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