4. Conclusion

Holographic imaging is a 3D imaging with all depth cues and inherent vision comfort for the viewer. That is why the last decade was marked by rapid development of methods of 3D capture and 3D content generation for holographic display, holographic projection and holographic printing. In the chapter, we considered implementation of the holographic imaging by digital means when the input data are in the form of a 2D real-valued matrix, which should encode the light wavefront coming from the 3D scene. This wavefront can be extracted from optically recorded holograms or synthesized numerically using various 3D scene descriptions. Holographic recording by digital photo-sensors or computer generation of holograms for pixelated SLMs imposes severe limitations on the space-bandwidth product of the capture/display system. We discussed two cases of data mapping from holographic capture to holographic display to show that holographic data transfer from optically recorded digital holograms to the data format of a given display is not a trivial task due to inevitable distortions introduced as a result of different capture and display parameters. Representing 3D contents as computer-generated holograms seems more flexible and promising way to create input data for holographic displays. The main requirements are to improve the quality of imaging and computational efficiency. We presented an algorithm for fast computation of holograms and showed the good quality of imaging it provided in holographic printing of white-light viewable reflection holograms.
