Digital holography is mainly used today for metrology and microscopic imaging and is emerging as an important potential technology for future holographic television. To generate the holographic content, computer-generated holography (CGH) techniques convert geometric descriptions of a 3D scene content. To model different surface types, an accurate model of light propagation has to be considered, including for example, specular and diffuse reflection. In previous work, we proposed a fast CGH method for point cloud data using multiple wavefront recording planes, look-up tables (LUTs) and occlusion processing. This work extends our method to account for diffuse reflections, enabling rendering of deep 3D scenes in high resolution with wide viewing angle support. This is achieved by modifying the spectral response of the light propagation kernels contained by the look-up tables. However, holograms encoding diffuse reflective surfaces depict significant amounts of speckle noise, a problem inherent to holography. Hence, techniques to improve the reduce speckle noise are evaluated in this paper. Moreover, we propose as well a technique to suppress the aperture diffraction during numerical, viewdependent rendering by apodizing the hologram. Results are compared visually and in terms of their respective computational efficiency. The experiments show that by modelling diffuse reflection in the LUTs, a more realistic yet computationally efficient framework for generating high-resolution CGH is achieved.

Date Published: 29 April 2016
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9896, Optics, Photonics and Digital Technologies for Imaging Applications IV, 98960F (29 April 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2225201

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9896:
Optics, Photonics and Digital Technologies for Imaging Applications IV
Peter Schelkens; Touradj Ebrahimi; Gabriel Cristóbal; Frédéric Truchetet; Pasi Saarikko, Editor(s)