Editorial for Focus Issue on Optical 3D Display and ImagingWith the impressive progress of flat panel display technologies, the three-dimensional (3D) display and imaging technologies have attracted much attention in recent years as they can provide ultimate realistic views to us. Hence we designed a focus issue intended to introduce recent optical researches in this field, especially the works by some distinguished research groups.This focus issue includes twenty-two invited papers, review papers, and contributed papers from China, South Korea, Japan, USA, UK, Israel, and Russian. We have classified the papers into four topics: 3D Holographic Display, Auto-stereography and Virtual Reality, Digital Holography, and Computer-generated Holography. It is hoped that this issue will bring the research community's attention to some of the latest development in the area.We want to thank the Executive Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Changhe Zhou, for inviting us to serve as this focus issue editors and Ms. Yanfang Hu for her valuable help in ensuring the timely production of this focus issue.

Multiple three-dimensional (3D) display technologies are reviewed. The display mechanisms discussed in this paper are classified into two categories: holographic display in wave optics and light field display in ray optics, which present the 3D optical wave field in two different ways. Key technical characteristics of the optical systems and the depth cues of human visual system are analyzed. It is to be expected that these 3D display technologies will achieve practical applications with the increase of the optical system bandwidth.

A multiplexed holographic display video has been achieved by using a passive azo-dye-doped liquid crystal (LC) cell. Holograms formed in this cell can be refreshed in the order of several milliseconds. By angular multiplexing technique, dynamically multiplexed holographic videos are realized. Moreover, the reconstructed RGB images are merged into a color image, which illustrates the possibility of a color holographic three-dimensional (3D) display by holographic multiplexing of the LC cell.

We propose an automatic three-dimensional (3D) pupil tracking backlight system for holographic 3D display system with large image size and full-parallax accommodation effect. The proposed tracking module is applied to a holographic 3D display system with two sets of directional holographic imaging module composed of 2×2 large scale lens array and 22-inch high-resolution liquid crystal display 3D panel. System architecture is described and experimental results are presented.

Light field displays comprise three-dimensional (3D) visual information presentation devices capable of providing realistic and full parallax autostereoscopic images. In this letter, the recent advances in the light field displays based on integral imaging (II) and holographic techniques are presented. Several advanced approaches to demonstrate the light field displays including viewing angle enhancement techniques of the II display, a fast hologram generation method using graphics processing unit (GPU) and multiple WRPs, and a holographic microscopy to display the living cells are reported. These methods improve some important constraints of the light field displays and add new features.

We propose a large parallax barrier by use of aperture grille. Main advantages of using aperture grille include no reflection and no absorption in apertures, as well as wide viewing angle. These advantages are investigated with theoretical calculations and experiments by use of several kinds of LED panels, such as a fine-pitch LED panel and a 140-inch large LED panel. Limitations of viewing angle by parallax barrier are analyzed in conventional black stripes on a transparent substrate type and in aperture grille type.Experimental results show use of aperture grille increases contrast and reduce reflection on the aperturesurface.

Based on light field reconstruction and motion recognition technique, a penetrable interactive floating 3D display system is proposed. The system consists of a high-frame-rate projector, a flat directional diffusing screen, a high-speed data transmission module, and a Kinect somatosensory device. The floating occlusion-correct 3D image could rotate around some axis at different speeds according to user’s hand motion. Eight motion directions and speed are detected accurately, and the prototype system operates efficiently with a recognition accuracy of 90% on average.

An auto-stereoscopic three-dimensional (3D) display method with the narrow structure pitch and high dense viewpoints is presented. Normally, the number of views is proportional to the structure pitch of the lenticular lens array. Increasing the density of views will decrease the spatial display resolution. Here a lenticular lens array with one pitch covering 5.333 subpiexels and a novel subpixel arrangement method are designed, and a 32 view 3D display is demonstrated. Compared with the traditional 6-view 3D display, the angular resolution and the displayed depth of field are significantly improved.

A light field three-dimensional (3D) display with multi-projectors and a concave screen is proposed. The system sets the viewing area at the center of the concave screen, making viewers enter the center of the system to watch 3D scene around them. The surrounded 3D scene provides viewers a feast of enhanced immersive experience. The light field principle, rendering algorithm, selection of viewing area and experimental results are discussed in the letter, showing the potential of being an all-around-type immersive 3D display by employing more projectors.

A new type of light field display is proposed using a head-mounted display (HMD) and a micro structure array (MSA, lens array or pinhole array). Each rendering point emits abundant rays from different directions into the viewer’s pupil, and at one time the dense light field is generated inside the exit pupil of the HMD through the eyepiece. Therefore, the proposed method not only solves the problem of accommodation and convergence conflict in a traditional HMD, but also drastically reduces the huge data in real three-dimensional (3D) display. To demonstrate the proposed method, a prototype is developed, which is capable of giving the observer a real perception of depth.

Accommodation and convergence play critical roles in the natural process of depth perception, and the field of natural three-dimensional (3D) perception in stereo displays has been extensively explored. However, no prototypes of these natural 3D displays are suitable for wear due to the system size and weight. In addition, few of the researches have involved subjects with ametropia. We propose and develop an optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) capable of diopter adjustment of both the virtual image and the real world scene. The prototype demonstrates a diagonal field of view (FOV) of 42o and an exit pupil diameter of 9 mm, and a diopter adjustment range of -5.5D to 0D. Depth adjustment of virtual image is demonstrated with experiments, the results show the HMD can be further used to investigate the accommodation and convergence cues in depth perception in AR environment, particularly for users with different degree of the ametropia.

Digital holographic (DH) microscopy is a promising technique for quantitative phase contrast imaging. It provides complex amplitude of the object wavefront, which in turn yields the thickness distribution of the object. An added advantage of the technique is its ability for numerical focusing, which provides the thickness distribution of the object at different axial planes. In this invited paper, we present an overview of our reported work on two beam DH microscopyto acquire different cell parameters for cell imaging and automated cell identification. Applications to automated monitoring of stem cells without destroying the cells and automated identification of malaria infected red blood cells are discussed.

Zero-order and twin images are a serious obstacle in achieving a high-quality output in in-line digital holography (DH). They decrease the useful bandwidth of the off-axis DH. Over the years the twin image removal problem was approached both by instrumental and numerical means. The paper provides an extended survey of the proposed solutions with their pros and cons as a guide for further advance in this field. Processing of a single spatial carrier fringe pattern involves spatial filtering in the frequency domain, spatial phase-shifting (PS) or wavelet transform. A point source digital holographic microscopy (DHM), introduction of calibration measurements or various modifications of PS technique are instrumental solutions to the twin image problem for in-line DH. Numerical solutions to the same problem include iterative and non-iterative approaches, diffraction-based and inverse problem solutions, reconstruction of purely real or phase objects and of complex objects, reconstruction of plane and volume objects. Elimination only of the zero-order image relies on non-linear filtering or additional calibration measurements.

The innovative radiating structures as a conical millimeter wave FZP lens are proposed for subwavelength focusing. The results of FDTD simulation and experimental verification are discussed. It has been shown that in contrast to the flat diffractive optics the curvilinear 3D diffractive conical optics is capable of overcoming 3D Abbe barrier with a focal distance F greater than 2. The focal intensity distribution for such type of lenses is not circularly symmetric and thus the focal spot in the high numerical aperture case is no longer an Airy pattern. These results may find useful applications in optical microscopes, including "reverse-microscope", nondestructive testing, microoptics, and nanooptics.

In this letter, we develope a control and image processing system for Streak Tube Imaging Lidar (STIL). In the system, the data acquisition card control and the software interface are programmed in Visual Basic (VB) while the image processing is finished by MATLAB. A STIL imaging experiment is carried out in the laboratory. We obtained the intensity and range images of targets with pseudo color by image processing and reconstruction for a set of raw streak images of targets at different distances acquired by STIL. The range resolution is better than 2 centimeters.

Graphics processing unit (GPU) based fast calculation method for computer generated spherical hologram (CGSH) of a real-existing object is proposed. Three-dimensional (3D) point cloud is constructed by capturing a real-existing object from multiple directions using a depth camera. The GPU based calculation is used in both hologram generation part and numerical reconstruction part of the CGSH. The improved calculation efficiency is verified by comparing the computation speed between central processing unit (CPU) based and GPU based implementation.

This paper describes a method for converting a complex Fresnel hologram into a phase-only hologram that can be embedded with large amount of data. Briefly, each row of pixels in the hologram is scanned sequentially in a left-to-right direction. The magnitude of each visited pixel is set to a constant, and its phase is embedded with the data. Subsequently, the error is diffused to the neighborhood pixels. The phase hologram realized with such means, which is referred to as the data-embedded-error-diffusion (DEED) hologram, is capable of preserving high fidelity on the content of the hologram and the embedded data.

Full-parallax light-field is captured by a small-scale 3D image scanning system and applied to holographic display. A vertical camera array is scanned horizontally to capture full-parallax imagery, and the vertical views between cameras are interpolated by depth image-based rendering technique. An improved technique for depth estimation reduces the estimation error and high-density light-field is obtained. The captured data is employed for the calculation of computer hologram using ray-sampling plane. This technique enables high-resolution display even in deep 3D scene although a hologram is calculated from ray information, and thus it makes use of the important advantage of holographic 3D display.

A novel method to extract a bounding box that contains the three-dimensional object from its spherical hologram is proposed. The proposed method uses the windowed Fourier transform to obtain the angular distribution of the quasi-collimated beams at each position in the spherical hologram and estimates the bounding box by accumulating the quasi-collimated beams in the volume inside the spherical hologram. The estimated bounding box is then used to realize occlusion effect between the objects in the synthesis of the three-dimensional scene hologram.

The nonuniform sampling method in hologram plane is proposed to reconstruct objects on multi-plane simultaneously. The hologram is nonuniformly sampled by decomposing it into several parts with various sampling rates. The hologram is calculated based on the nonuniform fast Fourier transform (NUFFT) algorithm. In the experiment, we load this nonuniformly sampled hologram on phases-only spatial light modulator (SLM), and by illumination with collimated light objects with different sampling rates are reconstructed at different distant planes simultaneously. Both of the numerically simulation and optical experiments are performed to demonstrate the feasibility of our method. The experiment also shows that our proposed nonuniform sampled hologram for multi-plane objects is calculated by only one step, better than conventional method that needs several steps of calculation proportional to the numbers of object planes.

A simple approach to calculate the amplitude component of a wave front propagating in space from a hologram is proposed. It is able to calculate the amplitude distribution on a plane at any distance rapidly using a standard GPU. This is useful for analyzing and reconstructing the 3D image encoded on a hologram.

During the last years the theory of compressive sensing has found significant utility in the digital holography realm. In this letter we summarize and extend our previous theoretical results which determine the relation between the number of Fresnel samples required on the object illumination type, illumination wavelength, imaging geometry and sensor's size and resolution.

We propose a method to improve the quality of the reconstructed images based on compressive sensing principles. The pseudo-inverse matrix and the total variation minimization algorithms are combined to reduce the sampling number of the computer generated hologram. Numerical simulations are performed and the results indicate that the peak signal to noise ratio is increased and the sampling ratio is decreased at the same time for holographic display.