Grayscale performance enhancement for time-multiplexing light field rendering.

One of the common approaches to compensate for the grayscale performance limitation in time-multiplexing light field displays is to employ a halftone technique. We propose an ordered-dithering halftone algorithm based on a 3-dimension super-mask to increase the gray levels of the time-multiplexing light field display. Our method makes full use of the overlapping perceived pixels which are caused by the time-multiplexing design, such that effectively trading-off the spatial resolution and color performance. A real-time rendering time-multiplexing display prototype is built to validate the proposed halftone algorithm. We conducted a user study to evaluate the quality of display scenes dithered by different super-mask configuration, which showed the consistency with the parameters we pre-calculated. The 3D ordered-dithering algorithm is able to present better visual perception than the conventional halftone algorithms with respect to grayscale representation, and flexible to be applied in different time-multiplexing light field display systems. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America