Apparent resolution enhancement for near-eye light field display

Abstract

Light field 3-D displays enable stereoscopic visual experience by simultaneously delivering multiple images corresponding to varying viewpoints to a viewer. When used in a near-eye wearable display setup, the light field display is able to offer a richer set of depth cues than the conventional binocular parallax based 3-D displays. The problem, however, is that the multi-view rendering on a single display inevitably leads to a reduced resolution that can be perceived. In this work, we propose a novel ray tracing based resolution enhancement framework for light field displays. In our approach, the multi-view light field is rendered with a ray-tracing engine, while the enhancement of the apparent resolution is achieved by generating a sequence of specifically designed images for each frame and displaying the images at a higher refreshing rate. The synthesis of the images is aimed to create the same visual perception results a high-resolution image does. By shooting several rays toward each pixel in a manner similar to anti-aliasing, the synthesis process can be seamlessly integrated into a ray tracing flow. The proposed algorithm was implemented on a near-eye light field display system. Experimental results as well as theoretic analysis and subjective evaluations proved the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.