3 D Display Rendering Acceleration Using Occlusion Camera Reference Images

1 Abstract—volumetric 3D displays are an emerging technology that allows the user to explore a 3D scene free of joysticks, keyboards, goggles, or trackers. For non-trivial scenes, computing and transferring a 3D image to the display takes hundreds of seconds, which is a serious bottleneck for many applications. We propose to represent the 3D scene with an occlusion camera reference image (OCRI). The OCRI is a compact scene representation that stores only and all scene samples that are visible from a viewing volume centered at a reference viewpoint. The OCRI is constructed efficiently, with the help of graphics hardware. The OCRI enables computing and transferring the 3D image an order of magnitude faster than when the entire scene is processed. The OCRI has a single-layer, thus it maintains the regular depth image advantages of bounded cost, inexpensive incremental processing, and implicit connectivity. Unlike regular depth images, the OCRI also stores samples that are not visible in the reference view, but are likely to become visible in adjacent views. These samples prevent disocclusion errors. The OCRI approach can be readily applied to several volumetric display technologies; we have tested the OCRI approach with good results on a volumetric display that creates the 3D image by projecting 2D slices of the scene on a rotating screen.