Real-time 3D light field transmission

Abstract

Although capturing and displaying stereo 3D content is now commonplace, information-rich light-field video content capture, transmission and display are much more challenging, resulting in at least one order of magnitude increase in complexity even in the simplest cases. We present an end-to-end system capable of capturing and real-time displaying of high-quality light-field video content on various HoloVizio light-field displays, providing very high 3D image quality and continuous motion parallax. The system is compact in terms of number of computers, and provides superior image quality, resolution and frame rate compared to other published systems. To generate light-field content, we have built a camera system with a large number of cameras and connected them to PC computers. The cameras were in an evenly spaced linear arrangement. The capture PC was directly connected through a single gigabit Ethernet connection to the demonstration 3D display, supported by a PC computation cluster. For the task of dense light field displaying massively parallel reordering and filtering of the original camera images is required. We were utilizing both CPU and GPU threads for this task. On the GPU we do the light-field conversion and reordering, filtering and the YUV-RGB conversion. We use OpenGL 3.0 shaders and 2D texture arrays to have easy access to individual camera images. A network-based synchronization scheme is used to present the final rendered images.