Stochastic Light Field Holography

The Visual Turing Test is the ultimate goal to evaluate the realism of holographic displays. Previous studies have focused on addressing challenges such as limited étendue and image quality over a large focal volume, but they have not investigated the effect of pupil sampling on the viewing experience in full 3D holograms. In this work, we tackle this problem with a novel hologram generation algorithm motivated by matching the projection operators of incoherent (Light Field) and coherent (Wigner Function) light transport. To this end, we supervise hologram computation using synthesized photographs, which are rendered on-the-fly using Light Field refocusing from stochastically sampled pupil states during optimization. The proposed method produces holograms with correct parallax and focus cues, which are important for passing the Visual Turing Test. We validate that our approach compares favorably to state-of-the-art CGH algorithms that use Light Field and Focal Stack supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm improves the viewing experience when evaluated under a large variety of different pupil states.

1 Introduction

IN 1972, the Cartier jewelry store on 5th Avenue in New York City displayed an analog hologram of a hand-holding jewelry on their window storefront. This hologram was so realistic that an elderly woman passing by attempted to attack the virtual arm floating in mid-air [1] . Large-format analog holograms are known for their incredible realism and ability to give the impression of a complete 3D picture frozen in time. For static objects, full-color holography has been shown to provide realism on par with the visual inspection of the actual object. As such, holography is often seen as the most likely approach to pass the Visual Turing Test [2] .