Intermediate View Image and its Digital Hologram Generation for an Virtual Arbitrary View-Point Hologram Service

This paper proposes an intermediate image generation method for the viewer`s view point by tracking the viewer`s face, which is converted to a digital hologram. Its purpose is to increase the viewing angle of a digital hologram, which is gathering higher and higher interest these days. The method assumes that the image information for the leftmost and the rightmost view points within the viewing angle to be controlled are given. It uses a stereo-matching method between the leftmost and the rightmost depth images to obtain the pseudo-disparity increment per depth value. With this increment, the positional informations from both the leftmost view point and the rightmost view point are generated, which are blended to get the information at the wanted intermediate viewpoint. The occurrable dis-occlusion region in this case is defined and a inpainting method is proposed. The results from implementing and experimenting this method showed that the average image qualities of the generated depth and RGB image were 33.83[dB] and 29.5[dB], respectively, and the average execution time was 250[ms] per frame. Also, we propose a prototype system to service digital hologram interactively to the viewer by using the proposed intermediate view generation method. It includes the operations of data acquisition for the leftmost and the rightmost viewpoints, camera calibration and image rectification, intermediate view image generation, computer-generated hologram (CGH) generation, and reconstruction of the hologram image. This system is implemented in the LabView(R) environments, in which CGH generation and hologram image reconstruction are implemented with GPGPUs, while others are implemented in software. The implemented system showed the execution speed to process about 5 frames per second.