Light Wave Field Rendering Principle And Application

There are a lot of important applications of wave theory in computer graphics. Many research works on it have been done in the past twenty years. In this paper, we present a wave theory based rendering technique: light wave field rendering, by combining wave graphics, Fourier optics, computational holography and the existed image based rendering techniques.In light wave field rendering, a 3D wave field is represented by one or more wavefronts which are stored as 2D arrays of complex numbers. The rendering process consists of mainly three steps. Firstly, the original wavefront samples are obtained in sampling step, by extracting the amplitude and phase information from a series of images. Next, all wavefront samples are combined together to form a single wavefront in synthesis step, by using wavefront transforms, view interpolation and synthesis operation. Finally, images or video control signals are extracted from the wavefront stored in a 2D array of complex numbers, to visually display the 3D wave field information.As to the sampling step, our interesting is mainly focused on amplitude and phase information extraction from image sequences. Images with depth information are obtained by using traditional rendering software, or camera devices subsequently with depth extracting algorithm from computer vision. Then the intensity and depth information are converted to the complex amplitudes of wavefront samples, by using the suggested geometry optics based converting method. In addition, direct wavefront rendering and extraction of complex amplitude from holography are also discussed.As to the synthesis step, we present a fast wavefront transform method based on plane wave spectral theory in Fourier optics. In this method, fast Fourier transform is used as a converter between wavefront and its corresponding plane wave spectral. The problem of wavefront propagation is then changed to the propagation of its corresponding plane wave spectral, and then the propagation of...