Hardware implementations of computer-generated holography: a review

Computer-generated holography (CGH) is a technique to generate holographic interference patterns. One of the major issues related to computer hologram generation is the massive computational power required. Hardware accelerators are used to accelerate this process. Previous publications targeting hardware platforms lack performance comparisons between different architectures and do not provide enough information for the evaluation of the suitability of recent hardware platforms for CGH algorithms. We aim to address these limitations and present a comprehensive review of CGH-related hardware implementations

Digital Holographic Three-Dimensional Video Displays

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Holography aims to record and regenerate volume filling light fields to reproduce ghost-like 3-D images that are optically indistinguishable from their physical 3-D originals. Digital holographic video displays are pixelated devices on which digital holograms can be written at video rates. Spatial light modulators (SLMs) are used for such purposes in practice; even though it is desirable to have SLMs that can modulate both the phase and amplitude of the incident light at each pixel, usually amplitude-only or phase-only SLMs are available. Many laboratories have reported working prototypes using different designs. Size and resolution of the SLMs are quite demanding for satisfactory 3-D reconstructions. Space–bandwidth product (SBP) seems like a good metric for quality analysis. Even though moderate SBP is satisfactory for a stationary observer with no lateral or rotational motion, the required SBP quickly increases when such motion is allowed. Multi-SLM designs, especially over curved surfaces, relieve high bandwidth requirements, and therefore, are strong candidates for futuristic holographic video displays. Holograms are quite robust to noise and quantization. It is demonstrated that either laser or light-emitting diode (LED) illumination is feasible. Current research momentum is increasing with many exciting and encouraging results

HOLOGRAPHICS: Combining Holograms with Interactive Computer Graphics

Among all imaging techniques that have been invented throughout the last decades, computer graphics is one of the most successful tools today. Many areas in science, entertainment, education, and engineering would be unimaginable without the aid of 2D or 3D computer graphics. The reason for this success story might be its interactivity, which is an important property that is still not provided efficiently by competing technologies – such as holography. While optical holography and digital holography are limited to presenting a non-interactive content, electroholography or computer generated holograms (CGH) facilitate the computer-based generation and display of holograms at interactive rates [2,3,29,30]. Holographic fringes can be computed by either rendering multiple perspective images, then combining them into a stereogram [4], or simulating the optical interference and calculating the interference pattern [5]. Once computed, such a system dynamically visualizes the fringes with a holographic display. Since creating an electrohologram requires processing, transmitting, and storing a massive amount of data, today’s computer technology still sets the limits for electroholography. To overcome some of these performance issues, advanced reduction and compression methods have been developed that create truly interactive electroholograms. Unfortunately, most of these holograms are relatively small, low resolution, and cover only a small color spectrum. However, recent advances in consumer graphics hardware may reveal potential acceleration possibilities that can overcome these limitations [6]. In parallel to the development of computer graphics and despite their non-interactivity, optical and digital holography have created new fields, including interferometry, copy protection, data storage, holographic optical elements, and display holograms. Especially display holography has conquered several application domains. Museum exhibits often use optical holograms because they can present 3D objects with almost no loss in visual quality. In contrast to most stereoscopic or autostereoscopic graphics displays, holographic images can provide all depth cues—perspective, binocular disparity, motion parallax, convergence, and accommodation—and theoretically can be viewed simultaneously from an unlimited number of positions. Displaying artifacts virtually removes the need to build physical replicas of the original objects. In addition, optical holograms can be used to make engineering, medical, dental, archaeological, and other recordings—for teaching, training, experimentation and documentation. Archaeologists, for example, use optical holograms to archive and investigate ancient artifacts [7,8]. Scientists can use hologram copies to perform their research without having access to the original artifacts or settling for inaccurate replicas. Optical holograms can store a massive amount of information on a thin holographic emulsion. This technology can record and reconstruct a 3D scene with almost no loss in quality. Natural color holographic silver halide emulsion with grain sizes of 8nm is today’s state-of-the-art [14]. Today, computer graphics and raster displays offer a megapixel resolution and the interactive rendering of megabytes of data. Optical holograms, however, provide a terapixel resolution and are able to present an information content in the range of terabytes in real-time. Both are dimensions that will not be reached by computer graphics and conventional displays within the next years – even if Moore’s law proves to hold in future. Obviously, one has to make a decision between interactivity and quality when choosing a display technology for a particular application. While some applications require high visual realism and real-time presentation (that cannot be provided by computer graphics), others depend on user interaction (which is not possible with optical and digital holograms). Consequently, holography and computer graphics are being used as tools to solve individual research, engineering, and presentation problems within several domains. Up until today, however, these tools have been applied separately. The intention of the project which is summarized in this chapter is to combine both technologies to create a powerful tool for science, industry and education. This has been referred to as HoloGraphics. Several possibilities have been investigated that allow merging computer generated graphics and holograms [1]. The goal is to combine the advantages of conventional holograms (i.e. extremely high visual quality and realism, support for all depth queues and for multiple observers at no computational cost, space efficiency, etc.) with the advantages of today’s computer graphics capabilities (i.e. interactivity, real-time rendering, simulation and animation, stereoscopic and autostereoscopic presentation, etc.). The results of these investigations are presented in this chapter

Studying the Recent Improvements in Holograms for Three-Dimensional Display

Displayers tend to become three-dimensional. The most advantage of holographic 3D displays is the possibility to observe 3D images without using glasses. The quality of created images by this method has surprised everyone. In this paper, the experimental steps of making a transmission hologram have been mentioned. In what follows, current advances of this science-art will be discussed. The aim of this paper is to study the recent improvements in creating three-dimensional images and videos by means of holographic techniques. In the last section we discuss the potentials of holography to be applied in future

Current research activities on holographic video displays

"True 3D" display technologies target replication of physical volume light distributions. Holography is a promising true 3D technique. Widespread utilization of holographic 3D video displays is hindered by current technological limits; research activities are targeted to overcome such difficulties. Rising interest in 3D video in general, and current developments in holographic 3D video and underlying technologies increase the momentum of research activities in this field. Prototypes and recent satisfactory laboratory results indicate that holographic displays are strong candidates for future 3D displays. © 2010 SPIE

Method to enlarge the hologram viewing window using a mirror module

A liquid crystal panel for a video projector is often used for holographic television. However, its pixel size and pixel number are not enough for practical holographic 3-D display. Therefore, a multipanel configuration is generally used to increase the viewing window and displayed image size, and many spatial light modulators should be used in them. We propose a novel method to increase the viewing window of a holographic display system. The proposed method, which is implemented by using a mirror module and 4-f lens set, is to reconfigure the beam shape reflected by a spatial light modulator. The equipment is applied to a holographic display system, which has only a single spatial light modulator; a hologram could be displayed in a wider viewing window by the equipment than that of the conventional method. By the proposed method, the resolution of the reconfigured spatial light modulator has double resolution in the horizontal direction. Inversely, the vertical resolution is decreased. Even if the vertical resolution is decreased, a viewer could get 3-D effect because humans get more 3-D information in the horizontal direction. We have experimented using a liquid crystal on silicon (LcOS), whose resolution is 4096×2160pixels. The reconfigured resolution by the mirror module is 8192×1080pixels. From the experiments, the horizontal viewing window is almost two times wider than that without the mirror module. As a result, the hologram can be observed binocularly. © 2009 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers

Experimental Aspects of Holographic Projection with a Liquid-Crystal-on-Silicon Spatial Light Modulator

Dynamic electroholography is a suitable and promising technology of image display for future projection and near-eye displays. Until a new phase modulation technology is introduced, practical research assumes the use of pixelated spatial light modulators based on liquid crystals with electronically controlled birefringence leading to a controllable refractive index. Such an approach allows for university grade development and testing of holographic computation methodology, but its limitations and drawbacks currently disable the massive application in consumer electronics. This chapter describes the differences between the behavior of the modulator as expected from Fourier optics and that observed in practical optical experiments. Moreover, practical hints and proven techniques of overcoming selected hardware issues of the chosen liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) phase modulators are given. The smart combination of the described techniques could allow more precise operation of spatial light modulators with a higher agreement with numerical simulations, especially for holographic projection of colorful images

Graphics processing unit accelerated computation of digital holograms

Cataloged from PDF version of article.An approximation for fast digital hologram generation is implemented on a central processing unit (CPU), a graphics processing unit (GPU), and a multi-GPU computational platform. The computational performance of the method on each platform is measured and compared. The computational speed on the GPU platform is much faster than on a CPU, and the algorithm could be further accelerated on a multi-GPU platform. In addition, the accuracy of the algorithm for single-and double-precision arithmetic is evaluated. The quality of the reconstruction from the algorithm using single-precision arithmetic is comparable with the quality from the double-precision arithmetic, and thus the implementation using single-precision arithmetic on a multi-GPU platform can be used for holographic video displays. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America