Abstract

It is well known that holographic display can provide 3D scenes with continuous viewpoints and free of accommodation–convergence conflict. So far most of the research in this area focuses on the display end, leaving the acquisition end merely explored. For holographic content acquisition, one needs to capture the scene in 3D. Ways to do this include the traditional optical holography and integral imaging. However, optical holography suffers from serious speckle while integral imaging has a long march to increase the resolution. In this paper, we propose a technique based on a variation of the transport of intensity equation to calculate the “phase” information of a scene from its defocusd intensity captured by a color camera under white light illumination. With the defocused phase and intensity data at hand, we can calculate the infocused wavefront of the scene, and further encode it into a computer generated hologram for subsequent holographic display. We demonstrate the proposed technique by simulation and experimental results. Compared with existing 3D acquisition techniques for holographic display, our method may provide better viewing experience due to the free of speckle in the acquisition stage, as well as the fact that the resolution does not limited by the microlenslet.

© 2014 Optical Society of America