SPIE - Education Fundamentals of 3D Imaging and 3D Displays SC1214

The course will review the following fundamentals which are necessary to understand, design, and analyze 3D imaging and display systems. The course helps the students to understand how 3D imaging works, what are the fundamentals, how to use optics to implement 3D displays, how to improve performance in 3D imaging systems and/or product lines and new product development programs, how to increase optical performance, or simply find new solutions to existing technological problems. Fundaments of Geometrical Optics: propagation of rays in transparent materials, refraction of rays in plane and spherical diopters, image formation with lenses, combination of lenses, aperture and field limitation, law of lenses: image position and magnification, examples and applications. Wave theory of image formation: the plane wave and the spherical waves, the wavefield as linear superposition of spherical waves, propagation of wavefields though converging lenses, waves through telecentric optical systems, image formation analyzed in terms of wave optics: the concepts of PSF, spatial resolution, OTF and frequency cut-off, light diffracted through periodic screens, examples and applications. Wave and ray theory of 3D optical capture and display systems such as plenoptic systems: capture of lightfield with an array of digital cameras: the synthetic aperture method, capture of lightfield with a plenoptic camera working in the 1.0 mode, capture of lightfield with a plenoptic camera working in the 2.0 mode, algorithms for the calculation of views and for the reconstruction in depth, examples and applications, implementation of synthetic-aperture setup, and implementation of a plenoptic camera.