David Blinder

Computer-generated holograms by multiple wavefront recording plane method with occlusion culling

We propose a novel fast method for full parallax computer-generated holograms with occlusion processing, suitable for volumetric data such as point clouds. A novel light wave propagation strategy relying on the sequential use of the wavefront recording plane method is proposed, which employs look-up tables in order to reduce the computational complexity in the calculation of the fields. Also, a novel technique for occlusion culling with little additional computation cost is introduced. Additionally, the method adheres a Gaussian distribution to the individual points in order to improve visual quality. Performance tests show that for a full-parallax high-definition CGH a speedup factor of more than 2,500 compared to the ray-tracing method can be achieved without hardware acceleration.

JPEG 2000-based compression of fringe patterns for digital holographic microscopy

Abstract. With the advent of modern computing and imaging technologies, digital holography is becoming widespread in various scientific disciplines such as microscopy, interferometry, surface shape measurements, vibration analysis, data encoding, and certification. Therefore, designing an efficient data representation technology is of particular importance. Off-axis holograms have very different signal properties with respect to regular imagery, because they represent a recorded interference pattern with its energy biased toward the high-frequency bands. This causes traditional images’ coders, which assume an underlying 1/f2 power spectral density distribution, to perform suboptimally for this type of imagery. We propose a JPEG 2000-based codec framework that provides a generic architecture suitable for the compression of many types of off-axis holograms. This framework has a JPEG 2000 codec at its core, extended with (1) fully arbitrary wavelet decomposition styles and (2) directional wavelet transforms. Using this codec, we report significant improvements in coding performance for off-axis holography relative to the conventional JPEG 2000 standard, with Bjøntegaard delta-peak signal-to-noise ratio improvements ranging from 1.3 to 11.6 dB for lossy compression in the 0.125 to 2.00 bpp range and bit-rate reductions of up to 1.6 bpp for lossless compression.

Wavelet coding of off-axis holographic images

Significant research efforts have been invested in attempting to reliably capture and visualize holograms since their inception in 1962. However, less attention has been given to the efficient digital representation of the recorded holograms, which differ considerably from digitally recorded photographs. This paper examines the properties of recorded off-axis holograms and attempts to find a suitable sparse representation for holographic data. Results show significantly improved Bjøntegaard delta PSNR of over 4.5 dB on average within a bit-rate range of 0.125 to 2 bpp when combining the direction-adaptive discrete wavelet transform with non-standard decomposition schemes for off-axis holographic recordings; up to 7.5% reduction of file size has been achieved in the lossless case.

Microscopic off-axis holographic image compression with JPEG 2000

With the advent of modern computing and imaging technologies, the use of digital holography became practical in many applications such as microscopy, interferometry, non-destructive testing, data encoding, and certification. In this respect the need for an efficient representation technology becomes imminent. However, microscopic holographic off-axis recordings have characteristics that differ significantly from that of regular natural imagery, because they represent a recorded interference pattern that mainly manifests itself in the high-frequency bands. Since regular image compression schemes are typically based on a Laplace frequency distribution, they are unable to optimally represent such holographic data. However, unlike most image codecs, the JPEG 2000 standard can be modified to efficiently cope with images containing such alternative frequency distributions by applying the arbitrary wavelet decomposition of Part 2. As such, employing packet decompositions already significantly improves the compression performance for off-axis holographic images over that of regular image compression schemes. Moreover, extending JPEG 2000 with directional wavelet transforms shows even higher compression efficiency improvements. Such an extension to the standard would only require signaling the applied directions, and would not impact any other existing functionality. In this paper, we show that wavelet packet decomposition combined with directional wavelet transforms provides efficient lossy-to-lossless compression of microscopic off-axis holographic imagery.

Efficient multiscale phase unwrapping methodology with modulo wavelet transform

Many robust phase unwrapping algorithms are computationally very time-consuming, making them impractical for handling large datasets or real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a generic framework using a novel wavelet transform that can be combined with many types of phase unwrapping algorithms. By inserting reversible modulo operators in the wavelet transform, the number of coefficients that need to be unwrapped is significantly reduced, which results in large computational gains. The algorithm is tested on various types of wrapped phase imagery, reporting speedup factors of up to 500. The source code of the algorithm is publicly available.

CDF 9/7 wavelets as sparsifying operator in compressive holography

Compressive sensing is a mathematical framework, which seeks to capture the information of an object using as few measurements as possible. Recently, it has been applied to holography, where the most frequently used reconstruction method is l1-norm minimization with the Haar wavelet as the sparsifying operator. In this work, we promote the CDF 9/7 wavelet as the sparsifying operator. We demonstrate that the CDF 9/7 wavelet performs better than the Haar wavelet.

Subjective quality assessment of numerically reconstructed compressed holograms

Recently several papers reported efficient techniques to compress digital holograms. Typically, the rate-distortion performance of these solutions was evaluated by means of objective metrics such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) or the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) by either evaluating the quality of the decoded hologram or the reconstructed compressed hologram. Seen the specific nature of holograms, it is relevant to question to what extend these metrics provide information on the effective visual quality of the reconstructed hologram. Given that today no holographic display technology is available that would allow for a proper subjective evaluation experiment, we propose in this paper a methodology that is based on assessing the quality of a reconstructed compressed hologram on a regular 2D display. In parallel, we also evaluate several coding engines, namely JPEG configured with the default perceptual quantization tables and with uniform quantization tables, JPEG 2000, JPEG 2000 extended with arbitrary packet decompositions and direction-adaptive filters and H.265/HEVC configured in intra-frame mode. The experimental results indicate that the perceived visual quality and the objective measures are well correlated. Moreover, also the superiority of the HEVC and the extended JPEG 2000 coding engines was confirmed, particularly at lower bitrates.

Compressing Macroscopic Near-field Digital Holograms With Wave Atoms

Pushing digital holography into mainstream markets requires efficient compression algorithms. Using a recent technique based on wave atoms, we explore its compression performance for macroscopic near-field holograms as a function of the Fresnel number.

Regularized non-convex image reconstruction in digital holographic microscopy

Inverse problem approaches for image reconstruction can improve resolution recovery over spatial filtering methods while reducing interference artifacts in digital off-axis holography. Prior works implemented explicit regularization operators in the image space and were only able to match intensity measurements approximatively. As a consequence, convergence to a strictly compatible solution was not possible. In this paper, we replace the non-convex image reconstruction problem for a sequence of surrogate convex problems. An iterative numerical solver is designed using a simple projection operator in the data domain and a Nesterov acceleration of the simultaneous Kaczmarz method. For regularization, the complex-valued object wavefield image is represented in the multiresolution CDF 9/7 wavelet domain and an energy-weighted preconditioning promotes minimum-norm solutions. Experiments demonstrate improved resolution recovery and reduced spurious artifacts in reconstructed images. Furthermore, the method is resilient to additive Gaussian noise and subsampling of intensity measurements.

Three-dimensional rendering of computer-generated holograms acquired from point-clouds on light field displays

Holograms, either optically acquired or simulated numerically from 3D datasets, such as point clouds, have special rendering requirements for display. Evaluating the quality of hologram generation techniques is not straightforward, since high-quality holographic display technologies are still immature, In this paper we present a framework for three-dimensional rendering of colour computer-generated holograms (CGHs) acquired from point-clouds, on high-end light field displays. This allows for the rendering of holographic content with horizontal parallax and wide viewing angle. We deploy prior work, namely a fast CGH method that inherently handles occlusion problems to acquire high quality colour holograms from point clouds. Our experiments showed that rendering holograms with the proposed framework provides 3D effect with depth disparity and horizontal-only with wide viewing angle. Therefore, it allows for the evaluation of CGH techniques regarding functional properties such as depth cues and efficient occlusion handling.