Suitability Analysis of Holographic vs Light Field and 2D Displays for Subjective Quality Assessment of Fourier Holograms

Visual quality assessment of digital holograms is facing many challenges. Main difficulties are related to the limited spatial resolution and angular field of view of holographic displays in combination with the complexity of steering and operating them for such tasks. Alternatively, non-holographic displays - and in particular light-field displays - can be utilized to visualize the numerically reconstructed content of a digital hologram. However, their suitability as alternative for holographic displays has not been validated. In this research, we have investigated this issue via a set of comprehensive experiments. We used Fourier holographic principle to acquire a diverse set of holograms, which were either computer-generated from point clouds or optically recorded from real macroscopic objects. A final public data set comprising 96 holograms was created using three compression methods which encoded the holograms at four bit-depths. Three separate subjective-tests were conducted using a holographic display, a light field display and a 2D display. For these subjective experiments, a double stimulus, multi-perspective, multi-depth subjective testing methodology was designed and implemented. The tests show that the non-holographic displays indicate a higher sensitivity to artifacts than the holographic display, though at the same time it is demonstrated they are highly correlated. This indicates that the numerically reconstructed holograms rendered on a light field or 2D display have a high predictive value for the perceived quality on holographic display.