Computational Super-Resolution Full-Parallax Three-Dimensional Light Field Display Based on Dual-Layer LCD Modulation

Peng Wang,Duo Chen,Binbin Yan,Xinzhu Sang

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2989677

Peng Wang, Duo Chen + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.2989677

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Abstract

Due to physical limitation in resolution of display device, it is usually very difficult to achieve a high spatial resolution and a high angular resolution simultaneously for a three-dimensional (3D) light field display. Here, a computational super-resolution full-parallax 3D light field display is demonstrated, which can achieve both high spatial resolution and angular resolution. The proposed display consists of a specially designed backlight unit with controlled scattering angle, two cascadedly arranged LCDs with a resolution of 3840 × 2160, an aberration-suppressed compound lens array, and a holographic functional screen. The optical image formation processing of the display is analyzed and modeled as a whole process, and the superresolution light field synthesis method is presented. By co-designing the optical elements with computation processing, our proposed display architecture can improve the spatial resolution and angular resolution with a factor of 2× in both horizontal and vertical directions, comparing with these of the conventional light field display with single LCD and standard lens array. Finally, a super-resolution full-parallax 3D light field display with a designed spatial resolution of about 640 × 360 in a display area of 21.5 inches and an angular resolution of 166 × 166 in a viewing angle of 45 × 45 degrees is constructed, and an excellent 3D visual experience with improved image quality can be perceived.

Highlights

Glass-free three dimensional (3D) display has attracted lots of attentions, and various efforts have been made to achieve a natural and realistic 3D visual experience [1]–[16]
A 3D light field display (LFD) is normally built by combining display devices with a series of optic elements, such as the integral imaging LFD based on LCD and lens-array [8]–[12], the projectiontype LFD based on multi-projection and holographic functional screen (HFS) [13], [14], and the compressive LFD based multi-layer LCD [15], [16]
The incident light field l(x, v) to HFS2 emitted by the compound lens array can be given by the multiplication of the light field b with controlled scattering angle emitted by the backlight, the pattern g displayed on LCD1, and the pattern h displayed on LCD2, 1M

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Glass-free three dimensional (3D) display has attracted lots of attentions, and various efforts have been made to achieve a natural and realistic 3D visual experience [1]–[16]. To improve spatial or angular resolution, researchers have attempted to display 3D images by combining multiple LCDs or projectors [21]–[23], such as our previous demonstrated dynamic 3D LFD with a viewing angle of 90 degrees with compound lenticular lens-array and three projectors [23]. Even though those methods can improve the spatial or angular resolutions of 3D images by introducing more display units, the display systems are usually costly, energy inefficient, or even bulky. In the remainder of this section, we describe the details of our proposed approach and analyze the performance and limitations

OPTICAL IMAGE FORMATION

SUPER-RESOLUTION LIGHT FIELD SYNTHESIS

SUPER-RESOLUTION LIGHT FIELD SYNTHESIS RESULTS

IMPLEMENTATION

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

CONCLUSION