Compression strategies for digital holograms in biomedical and multimedia applications

While 60 years of successful application of holography is celebrated in this special issue, efficient representation and compression of holographic data has received relatively little attention in research. Notwithstanding this observation, and particularly due to the digitization that is also penetrating the holographic domain, interest is growing on how to efficiently compress holographic data such that interactive exchange of content, as well as digital storage can be facilitated proficiently. This is a particular challenge, not only because of its interferometric nature and the various representation formats, but also the often extremely large data volumes involved in pathological, tomographic, or high-end visualization applications. In this paper, we provide an overview of the state of the art in compression techniques and corresponding quality metrics for various practical applications in digital holography. We also consider the future by analyzing the emerging trends for addressing the key challenges in this domain.