Real-time pre-rectification of aberrations for 3D light-field display based on a constructed virtual lens and ray path tracing

Abstract Aberrations caused by optical lens refraction in a light-field display (LFD) are minimized based on real-time pre-rectification. A virtual optical lens with the high precision surface is developed the constructive solid geometry under minimum primitives to rectify the sampling rays, and the virtual lens exhibits the same response to different incident ray wavelengths as the real lens in the LFD optical domain. In addition, assembly misalignment is taken into consideration during the partitioning of the elemental image array so that all the elemental images and the covering lenses can be precisely aligned. After rectifying the sampling rays with the constructed virtual lens, the rays are launched in parallel in the GPU, and path tracing is conducted to shade the element image array. The proposed approach ensures the consistency of the integral photography and LFD processes, which minimize the distortion and increasing the depth of field for three-dimensional (3D) images. Experimental results verify the feasibility of our proposed method. The structural similarity index is improved by 0.1, and 3D images at different depths are correctly expressed. Only three primitives are introduced to the system as a whole, meaning that the extra computation has little impact on the rendering efficiency. Consequently, the real-time generation of 3D light-field images is possible.