  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.
