Since its invention in 1948 by Dennis Gabor holography has held the promise to empower full parallax 3D visualisation. Though the trajectory has been significantly longer than expected, recent developments in photonics, microelectronics and computer engineering have led to the prospective to realize within a decade dynamic full parallax holography with acceptable rendering quality and viewing angle. Unfortunately projections – based on the current state-of-the-art and expected evolutions in the underlying “hardware” technologies – still predict exascale computing power and terabytes-per-second data rates.

Since dynamic digital holography requires huge amounts of pixels to be sensed, transmitted and represented, sparse signal representations hold a great promise reducing the computational complexity and bandwidth usage. INTERFERE will design a generic source coding methodology and architecture to facilitate the exploitation of sparse signal representations for dynamic, full parallax, large viewing angle digital holography and more generic, interference-based modalities, with the ambition to reduce the signal processing tailbacks while exploiting simultaneously human visual system characteristics.

Realizing these research objectives – with a strong focus on advanced signal representations, associated source coding methodologies and visual quality modelling – will provide a breakthrough with respect to the complexity reduction and thus realisation of full-parallax, wide viewing angle dynamic digital holography and benefit the earlier mentioned adjacent scientific fields. Intermediate results or components will have serendipic effects on other scientific disciplines and open new horizons for markets such as – but not limited to – medical imaging, biophotonics, life sciences, public safety, digital holographic microscopy, holographic biomedical sensors, data storage and metrology, illustrating the high-gain potential of INTERFERE.