HR3D: High-Rank 3D Display and Gigapixel Computational Imaging

Today, we have two projects focused on expanding the  boundaries of imaging systems using computational power. In the first 3D display, we see the use of the NMF to provide inputs to the screens of the set-up.

HR3D: High-Rank 3D Display using Content-Adaptive Parallax Barriers by Douglas Lanman, Matthew Hirsch, Yunhee Kim, Ramesh Raskar. The abstract reads:

We have developed a 3D display called High-Rank 3D (HR3D). Unlike displays currently sold for home and theater use, the HR3D display does not require any special glasses or eyewear. In addition, the HR3D display generates multi-view imagery, meaning that viewers can truly look around the edges of 3D objects. In the above figure, we show this effect as best we can on a 2D display using an animation.

Current commercially-available, glasses-free 3D displays use a simple concept known as parallax barriers. Our paper presents a mathematical insight into this basic tool for glasses-free 3D display that allows our HR3D display to be up to 3× brighter and to have higher frame rate than existing parallax barrier displays. We present the details below in the Brief Technical Description section.

On mobile devices and in televisions, we live in a power-conscious world where the reality of batteries and health of the environment demand that we cannot produce ever-brighter display backlights. Yet we also demand richer, more realistic interaction and viewing experiences from these devices. Our HR3D display points a way forward to a bright future for vibrant, realisitc display technology.

 and Gigapixel Computational Imaging by Oliver Cossairt, D. Miau, Shree K. Nayar. The project description starts with:

Today's high-resolution cameras capture images with pixel counts in the tens of millions. When digital cameras can produce images with billions of pixels, they will usher in a new era for photography. A gigapixel image has such a tremendous amount of information that one can explore minute details of the scene (see Figure 1). Gigapixel images are fascinating because they capture orders of magnitude more detail than the human eye, revealing information that was completely imperceptible to the photographer at the time of capture. At present, highly specialized gigapixel imaging systems are being developed for aerial surveillance [1].

Why are there no gigapixel cameras commercially available today? CMOS and CCD technologies have improved to the point that imaging sensors with pixels in the 1µm range have been demonstrated [2]. It is certainly within the reach of manufacturing technology to produce sensors with 1 billion pixels. On the other hand, it remains a huge challenge to design and manufacture lenses which have the resolving power to match the resolution of such a sensor. This is because the number of resolvable points for a lens, referred to as the Space-Bandwidth Product (SBP) [3], is fundamentally limited by geometrical aberrations.SBP is a unit-less quantity that tells us the number of distinct points which can be measured over a given FOV.Ideally, all lenses would be diffraction limited so that increasing the scale of a lens while keeping FOV fixed would increase SBP. Unfortunately, SBP reaches a limit due to geometrical aberrations.