A fast calculation method for computer generation of spherical holograms in proposed. This method is based on wave propagation defined in spectral domain and in spherical coordinates. The spherical wave spectrum and transfer function were derived from boundary value solutions to the scalar wave equation. It is a spectral propagation formula analogous to angular spectrum formula in cartesian coordinates. A numerical method to evaluate the derived formula is suggested, which uses only N(logN)2 operations for calculations on N sampling points. Simulation results are presented to verify the correctness of the proposed method. A spherical hologram for a spherical object was generated and reconstructed successfully using the proposed method.

Concave micro-mirror arrays fabricated as holographic optical elements are used in projector-based light field displays due to their see-through characteristics. The optical axes of each micro-mirror in the array are usually made parallel to each other, which simplifies the fabrication, integral image rendering, and calibration process. However, this demands that the beam from the projector be collimated and made parallel to the optical axis of each elemental micro-mirror. This requires additional collimation optics, which puts serious limitations on the size of the display. In this Letter, we propose a solution to the above issue by introducing a new method to fabricate holographic concave micro-mirror array sheets and explain how they work in detail. 3D light field reconstructions of the size 20  cm×10  cm and 6 cm in depth are achieved using a conventional projector without any collimation optics.

A fast calculation method for computer generation of cylindrical holograms is proposed. The calculation method is based on wave propagation in spectral domain and in cylindrical co-ordinates, which is otherwise similar to the angular spectrum of plane waves in cartesian co-ordinates. The calculation requires only two FFT operations and hence is much faster. The theoretical background of the calculation method, sampling conditions and simulation results are presented. The generated cylindrical hologram has been tested for reconstruction in different view angles and also in plane surfaces.

A parallel computation method for large-size Fresnel computer-generated hologram (CGH) is reported. The method was introduced by us in an earlier report as a technique for calculating Fourier CGH from 2D object data. In this paper we extend the method to compute Fresnel CGH from 3D object data. The scale of the computation problem is also expanded to 2 gigapixels, making it closer to real application requirements. The significant feature of the reported method is its ability to avoid communication overhead and thereby fully utilize the computing power of parallel devices. The method exhibits three layers of parallelism that favor small to large scale parallel computing machines. Simulation and optical experiments were conducted to demonstrate the workability and to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed technique. A two-times improvement in computation speed has been achieved compared to the conventional method, on a 16-node cluster (one GPU per node) utilizing only one layer of parallelism. A 20-times improvement in computation speed has been estimated utilizing two layers of parallelism on a very large-scale parallel machine with 16 nodes, where each node has 16 GPUs.

A method has been proposed to reduce the communication overhead in computer-generated hologram (CGH) calculations on parallel and distributed computing devices. The method uses the shifting property of Fourier transform to decompose calculations, thereby avoiding data dependency and communication. This enables the full potential of parallel and distributed computing devices. The proposed method is verified by simulation and optical experiments and can achieve a 20 times speed improvement compared to conventional methods, while using large data sizes.