Compression of interference patterns with application to phase-shifting digital holography

A compression method of phase-shifting digital holographic data is presented. Three interference patterns are recorded, and holographic information is extracted from them by phase-shifting interferometry. The scheme uses standard baseline Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) or standard JPEG-2000 image compression techniques on the recorded interference patterns to reduce the amount of data to be stored. High compression rates are achieved for good reconstructed object image quality. The utility of the proposed method is experimentally verified with real holographic data. Results for compression rates using JPEG-2000 and JPEG of approximately 27 and 20, respectively, for a normalized root-mean-square error of similar to 0.7 are demonstrated. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.