Displaying Real-World Light Fields With Stacked Multiplicative Layers: Requirement and Data Conversion for Input Multiview Images

To provide realistic 3-D perception to human observers, 3-D displays have evolved to present not only a pair of stereo images but also many images to different viewing directions. A light-field display, which consists of a few light-attenuating pixelized layers (e.g., LCD panels) stacked in front of a backlight, has attracted attention because of its potential to simultaneously support many viewing directions with high quality. The transmittances of the layers are determined from a set of multiview images or a light field that is given to represent observations expected from many viewing directions. However, the relation between the configuration of the given light field and the quality of displayed images has not sufficiently been discussed in previous works. In this study, in our aim to display real-world objects with high quality, we address the requirement for the target light field given as the input. We deeply analyze several factors that associate the configuration of the target light field with the quality of the displayed images, and we derive a quantitative requirement on the configuration: The disparities among the adjacent viewpoints should be limited to 0-1 pixels. To meet this strict requirement with real-world objects, we propose using a multiview camera and image-based rendering, where we can generate virtual light fields with arbitrary configurations and densities. Our theory and method are verified by experiments using a computer-simulated display.