Real-time computer-generated light field displays by pre-storing the invariable voxel-pixel mapping

Conventionally, an integral imaging light field display's elemental image array (EIA) is computationally generated by setting a virtual camera array. The method's high computation complexity hinders real-time rendering. Previous studies utilized high-performance parallel computing to accelerate, which, however, brought about high power consumption and cost concerning portable VR, AR, and MR devices. Some studies used a sparse camera array for fewer computations, but the generation accuracy had to be sacrificed. In this Letter, we propose a new rendering method reducing the computational complexity hundreds of times. We demonstrate that every voxel is invariably reconstructed by several homogeneous pixels on the image source. The invariable voxel-pixel mapping is pre-stored as a lookup table (LUT). Once a target 3D scene is inputted, it is resampled to a voxel array. Next, the voxel array is fast mapped to an EIA through the LUT. If a typical rectangular EIA is used, the mapping can be implemented in columns and rows, further reducing computations and the LUT size. The proposed method requires no advanced computing hardware and is independent of the model used for raytracing. Experimental verification.