Sympathetic quantisation -- a new approach to hologram quantisation

TL;DR

Sympathetic quantisation is a novel hologram quantisation method that leverages diffraction relationships to significantly improve image quality metrics over traditional nearest-neighbour approaches.

Contribution

The paper introduces sympathetic quantisation, a new hologram quantisation technique that enhances post-quantisation performance by considering diffraction effects.

Findings

50% improvement in mean squared error

50% improvement in structural similarity index

Effective for single-transform algorithms

Abstract

Spatial light modulators can typically only modulate the phase or the amplitude of an incident wavefront, with only a limited number of discrete values available. This is often accounted for in computer-generated holography algorithms by setting hologram pixel values to the nearest achievable value during what is known as quantisation. Sympathetic quantisation is an alternative to this nearest-neighbour approach that takes into account the underlying diffraction relationships in order to obtain a significantly improved post-quantisation performance. The concept of sympathetic quantisation is introduced in this paper and a simple implementation, soft sympathetic quantisation, is presented which is shown to improve mean squared error and structural similarity index error metrics by 50% for the considered case of single-transform algorithms.