Image processing technique for the reproduction of deep 3-D images by holoprinter

A holographic 3-D printer (holoprinter) is being developed for the hardcopy output of 3-D image processing systems. In this paper, an image processing technique is proposed for the reproduction of deep 3-D images by the holoprinter. The sampling scheme of parallax information in the one-step and two-step holographic stereograms are compared, and it is shown that the image near the hologram plane has good paraflax information in the one-step holographic stereogram, but the image far from the hologram plane is blurred. To suppress the image blur in the far image, a method to produce the image equivalent to two-step recording is developed. By this method, the image far from the hologram plane is displayed as a stereoscopic image hologram, resulting in the suppression of blur. But the image near the hologram plane is reproduced with fine sampling, and natural 3-D image can be displayed. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.