Signal Processing Methods for Light Field Displays

Abstract

This chapter discusses the topic of emerging light field displays from a signal processing perspective. Light field displays are defined as devices which deliver continuous parallax along with the focus and binocular visual cues acting together in rivalry-free manner. In order to ensure such functionality, one has to deal with the light field, conceptualized by the plenoptic function and its adequate parametrization, sampling and reconstruction. The light field basics and the corresponding display technologies are overviewed in order to address the fundamental problems of analyzing light field displays as signal processing channels, and of capturing and representing light field visual content for driving such displays. Spectral analysis of multidimensional sampling operators is utilized to profile the displays in question, and modern sparsification approaches are employed to develop methods for high-quality light field reconstruction and rendering.