Quantifying Spatial and Angular Resolution of Light-Field 3-D Displays

Light-field 3-D displays are expected to play an important role as terminal devices, visualizing 3-D objects apparently floating in the air, or letting viewers see through a window with a scene behind it. Currently, there are neither methods nor practical tools to quantify light-field display's effective resolution or the perceived quality of the presented imagery. Most 3-D displays are simply characterized by the total number of pixels or light rays; however, this number does not properly characterize the distribution of the emitted light rays, or the level of detail that the display can visualize properly. This paper presents methods to measure the spatial (i.e., 2-D equivalent) and angular (i.e., directional) resolution of a given light-field display. The frequency-domain analysis of recorded test patterns gives the spatial resolution limit of the display under test, while angular resolution is determined by the display's ability to pass through patterns of uniform angle-dependent patterns. It also presents a subjective experiment to corroborate the objectively measured spatial resolution.