Digital holography represents a novel media which promises to revolutionize the way the users interacts with content. This paper presents an in-depth review of the state-of-the-art algorithms for advanced processing and rendering of computer-generated holography. Open-access holographic data are selected and characterized as references for the experimental analysis. The design of a tool for digital hologram rendering and quality evaluation is presented and implemented as an open-source reference software, with the aim to encourage the approach to the holography research area, and simplify the rendering and quality evaluation tasks. Exploration studies focused on the reproducibility of the results are reported, showing a practical application of the proposed architecture for standardization activities. A final discussion on the results obtained is reported, also highlighting the future developments of the reconstruction software that is made publicly available with this work.

Digital holography processing is a research topic related to the development of novel visual immersive applications. The huge amount of information conveyed by a digital hologram and the different properties of holographic data with respect to conventional photographic data require a comprehension of the performances and limitations of current image and video standard techniques. This paper proposes an architecture for objective evaluation of the performances of the state-of-the-art compression techniques applied to digital holographic data.

Digital holography is an imaging technique with great potential, that allows the acquisition and the reproduction of the entire wavefield of light. A big challenge in this field is the development of efficient coding tools, due to the different hologram data characteristics compared to standard multimedia content. This work presents an experimental comparison between two different coding techniques: the well-known hologram plane coding and the less-investigated object plane coding. In order to identify advantages and limitations of each method, but also to determine if the object plane coding could be an effective alternative to the more simple hologram plane coding, different types of holograms are employed, analyzing and discussing the obtained results.