Integral photography suitable for small-lot production using mutually perpendicular lenticular sheets and fractional view

Abstract

We developed an integral photography (IP) system that is suitable for small-lot production and is, in principle, applicable to animation. IP is an ideal 3D display method because users can see stereoscopic 3D images from arbitrary directions. However, IP is less popular than lenticular display using only the horizontal parallax, probably because the initial cost of designing and producing a fly's eye lens is very high. We used two technologies to solve this problem. First, we used two mutually perpendicular lenticular sheets instead of a fly's eye lens sheet. A lenticular sheet is much less expensive than a fly's eye lens because it is easier to produce. Second, we used the fractional view method, in which the ratio of lens pitch to pixel pitch is not limited to simple integer ratios, which means that no custom-made lenticular lens is necessary. However, the original fractional view method is applicable only to horizontal parallax. We made it applicable to both horizontal and vertical parallaxes by using two mutually perpendicular lenticular sheets. In addition, we developed a simple technique for generating dedicated synthesized images for IP.