Color Holographic Wavefront Printing Technique for Realistic Representation

This paper presents design and implementation of a color wavefront holographic printer. The printer output is a white light viewable volume hologram composed as a two-dimensional (2-D) array of elemental holograms. The three-dimensional (3-D) input data for the printer are encoded as computer generated holograms (CGHs) displayed in succession on an amplitude type spatial light modulator. The printer optical head extracts and demagnifies the beam with the 3-D object information from the beam diffracted by the modulator to produce a small size elemental hologram. This allows for mosaic delivery of exposures at primary colors with each elemental hologram acting as a single color channel. Computer generation of digital contents is accelerated by design of a phase-added stereogram approach based on partitioning of each CGH. Bright 3-D reconstruction with a motion parallax at saturated colors from holograms of test objects is presented. The holograms are printed on a silver-halide emulsion. The achieved high quality proves feasibility of recording analog color volume holograms from digital contents by mosaic delivery of the primary colors. Two quality enhancement approaches are proposed and tested.