Flat Panel Light-Field 3-D Display: Concept, Design, Rendering, and Calibration

Recent autostereoscopic 3-D (A3D) displays suffer from many limitations such as narrow viewing angle, low resolution, and shallow depth effects. As these limitations mainly originate from the insufficiency of pixel resources, it is not easy to obtain a feasible solution that can solve all the limitations simultaneously. In many cases, it will be better to find a good compromising design. Generally, the multiview display and the integral imaging display are the representative designs of A3D. However, as they are too canonical and lack flexibility in design, they tend to be a tradeoff. To address these design issues, we have analyzed the multiview display and the integral image display in a light-field coordinate and developed a 3-D display design framework in a light-field space. The developed framework does not use the “view” concept anymore. Instead, it considers the spatial distribution of rays of the 3-D display and provides more flexible and sophisticated design methods. In this paper, the developed design method is explained using a new pixel value assigning algorithm, called the light-field rendering, and vision-based parameter calibration methods for 3-D displays. We have also analyzed the blur effects caused by the depth and display characteristics. By implementing the proposed method, we have designed a 65-in 96-view display with a 4K panel. The developed prototype has showed almost seamless parallax with a high-resolution comparable to the conventional four to five views displays. This paper will be useful to readers interested in A3D displays, especially in the multiview and the integral imaging displays.