Volume hologram printer to record the wavefront of three-dimensional objects

Abstract

A computer-generated hologram (CGH) is well-known to reconstruct 3-D images faithfully, and several CGH printers are reported. Since those printers can only output a transmission hologram, the large-scale optical system is necessary to reconstruct the full-parallax, full-color image. As a method of a simple reconstruction, it is only necessary to use a volume reflection hologram. However, the making of a volume hologram needs to transfer the CGH by means of an optical system. On the other hand, there are printers that output volume type holographic stereograms with the full-parallax, full-color image. However, the reconstructed image whose depth is large gets blurred due to the insufficient sampling rays of a 3-D object. The authors propose the volume hologram printer to record the wavefront of a 3-D object. By transferring the CGH that is displayed on a liquid crystal on silicon, the proposed printer can output the volume hologram. In addition, the large volume hologram can be printed by transferring plural CGH that recorded the partial 3-D object in turn. As a result, the printed volume hologram has been able to reconstruct a monochrome 3-D image by white light illumination, and realized the full-parallax image.

Image-Quality Enhancement for a Holographic Wavefront Color Printer by Adaptive SLM Partitioning

“…The input data formed from incoherently acquired perspective images of the 3D scene carry only directional information, and thus this printing method inevitably suffers from longitudinal distortion in the reconstruction of deep scenes. In contrast, the recently proposed holographic fringe and wavefront printers use as input data for the SLM a computer generated hologram (CGH) [9][10][11][12][13][14], which encodes both directional and depth information. In the fringe printer the CGH is directly transferred onto the holographic emulsion, without a reference beam during recording [9].…”

“…The output of the wavefront printer, on the other hand, is a volume reflection hologram. This method relies on extraction of the wavefront coming from the 3D object, and thus resembles an analog holography recording process [10][11][12][13][14].…”

Progress in the Synthetic Holographic Stereogram Printing Technique

“…In wavefront printing, the holograms are calculated by a computer, but the algorithm is different from that of holographic fringe printing. Holographic fringe patterns are diffracted and propagated to the recording medium, interfered with by the reference beam, and reflection volume-type holograms can be achieved [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26].…”

Application of wavefront printer-from static 3D visualization to projection-type holographic display-

“…For hologram recording of digital three-dimensional (3D) data, wavefront printer has been proposed by several research groups [1][2][3][4]. In contrast to a holographic stereogram (HS) printer that is based on the recording/reconstruction of dense light-rays, wavefront printer records the wavefront with full-control of both amplitude and phase distributions reproduced by computer generated holograms (CGH).…”