Color wavefront printer with mosaic delivery of primary colors

Abstract

The paper presents design and implementation of a color wavefront holographic printer which prints white light viewable holograms of three-dimensional (3D) objects from digital contents. Similarly to other holographic printers, the printed hologram is composed as a two-dimensional array of elemental volume holograms. In the proposed wavefront printer, the 3D information was encoded in computer generated holograms displayed in succession on an amplitude spatial light modulator. The light beam diffracted from the modulator was filtered to extract the beam coming from the object and demagnified to be recorded onto the holographic emulsion as a small size elemental hologram that made possible application of mosaic delivery of exposures at primary colors. As a result, each elemental hologram corresponded to a single color channel. A modified phase-added stereogram approach based on a hologram partitioning method was proposed to accelerate computer generation of digital contents. We achieved bright 3D reconstruction with a motion parallax at saturated colors from holograms of test objects that were printed on a silver-halide emulsion. Thus we proved experimentally feasibility of recording analog color volume holograms from digital contents by applying spatially separated exposures at primary colors to the elemental holograms.