The Visual Turing Test is the ultimate goal to evaluate the realism of holographic displays. Previous studies have focused on addressing challenges such as limited étendue and image quality over a large focal volume, but they have not investigated the effect of pupil sampling on the viewing experience in full 3D holograms. In this work, we tackle this problem with a novel hologram generation algorithm motivated by matching the projection operators of incoherent (Light Field) and coherent (Wigner Function) light transport. To this end, we supervise hologram computation using synthesized photographs, which are rendered on-the-fly using Light Field refocusing from stochastically sampled pupil states during optimization. The proposed method produces holograms with correct parallax and focus cues, which are important for passing the Visual Turing Test. We validate that our approach compares favorably to state-of-the-art CGH algorithms that use Light Field and Focal Stack supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm improves the viewing experience when evaluated under a large variety of different pupil states.

Computer generated holography has long been touted as the future of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) displays, but has yet to be realized in practice. Previous high-quality, color holographic displays have made either a 3 × sacrifice on frame rate by using a sequential color illumination scheme or used more than one spatial light modulator (SLM) and/or bulky, complex optical setups. The reduced frame rate of sequential color introduces distracting judder and color fringing in the presence of head motion while the form factor of current simultaneous color systems is incompatible with a head-mounted display. In this work, we propose a framework for simultaneous color holography that allows the use of the full SLM frame rate while maintaining a compact and simple optical setup. Simultaneous color holograms are optimized through the use of a perceptual loss function, a physics-based neural network wavefront propagator, and a camera-calibrated forward model. We measurably improve hologram quality compared to other simultaneous color methods and move one step closer to the realization of color holographic displays for AR/VR.

Holographic displays promise several benefits including high quality 3D imagery, accurate accommodation cues, and compact form-factors. However, holography relies on coherent illumination which can create undesirable speckle noise in the final image. Although smooth phase holograms can be speckle-free, their non-uniform eyebox makes them impractical, and speckle mitigation with partially coherent sources also reduces resolution. Averaging sequential frames for speckle reduction requires high speed modulators and consumes temporal bandwidth that may be needed elsewhere in the system. In this work, we propose multisource holography, a novel architecture that uses an array of sources to suppress speckle in a single frame without sacrificing resolution. By using two spatial light modulators, arranged sequentially, each source in the array can be controlled almost independently to create a version of the target content with different speckle. Speckle is then suppressed when the contributions from the multiple sources are averaged at the image plane. We introduce an algorithm to calculate multisource holograms, analyze the design space, and demonstrate up to a 10 dB increase in peak signal-to-noise ratio compared to an equivalent single source system. Finally, we validate the concept with a benchtop experimental prototype by producing both 2D images and focal stacks with natural defocus cues.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown promise in augmenting datasets and boosting convolutional neural network (CNN) performance on image classification tasks. But they introduce more hyperparameters to tune as well as the need for additional time and computational power to train, supplementary to the CNN. In this work, we examine the potential for Auxiliary-Classifier GANs (AC-GANs) as a ’one-stop-shop’ architecture for image classification, particularly in low data regimes. Additionally, we explore modifications to the typical AC-GAN framework, changing the generator’s latent space sampling scheme and employing a Wasserstein loss with gradient penalty to stabilize the simultaneous training of image synthesis and classification. Through experiments on images of varying resolutions and complexity, we demonstrate that AC-GANs show promise in image classification, achieving competitive performance with standard CNNs. These methods can be employed as an ’all-in-one’ framework with particular utility in the absence of large amounts of training data.

Holographic displays promise to deliver unprecedented display capabilities in augmented reality applications, featuring a wide field of view, wide color gamut, spatial resolution, and depth cues all in a compact form factor. While emerging holographic display approaches have been successful in achieving large étendue and high image quality as seen by a camera, the large étendue also reveals a problem that makes existing displays impractical: the sampling of the holographic field by the eye pupil. Existing methods have not investigated this issue due to the lack of displays with large enough étendue, and, as such, they suffer from severe artifacts with varying eye pupil size and location. We show that the holographic field as sampled by the eye pupil is highly varying for existing display setups, and we propose pupil-aware holography that maximizes the perceptual image quality irrespective of the size, location, and orientation of the eye pupil in a near-eye holographic display. We validate the proposed approach both in simulations and on a prototype holographic display and show that our method eliminates severe artifacts and significantly outperforms existing approaches.

Light-field imaging is appealing to the mobile devices market because of its capability for intuitive post-capture processing. Acquiring light field (LF) data with high angular, spatial and temporal resolution poses significant challenges, especially with space constraints preventing bulky optics. At the same time, stereo video capture, now available on many consumer devices, can be interpreted as a sparse LF-capture. We explore the application of small baseline stereo videos for reconstructing high fidelity LF videos.We propose a self-supervised learning-based algorithm for LF video reconstruction from stereo video. The self- supervised LF video reconstruction is guided via the geometric information from the individual stereo pairs and the temporal information from the video sequence. LF estimation is further regularized by a low-rank constraint based on layered LF displays. The proposed self-supervised algorithm facilitates advantages such as post-training finetuning on test sequences and variable angular view interpolation and extrapolation. Quantitatively the reconstructed LF videos show higher fidelity than previously proposed unsupervised approaches. We demonstrate our results via LF videos generated from publicly available stereo videos acquired from commercially available stereoscopic cameras. Finally, we demonstrate that our reconstructed LF videos allow applications such as post-capture focus control and region-of-interest (RoI) based focus tracking for videos.

The utilization of computational photography becomes increasingly essential in the medical field. Today, imaging techniques for dermatology range from two-dimensional (2D) color imagery with a mobile device to professional clinical imaging systems measuring additional detailed three-dimensional (3D) data. The latter are commonly expensive and not accessible to a broad audience. In this work, we propose a novel system and software framework that relies only on low-cost (and even mobile) commodity devices present in every household to measure detailed 3D information of the human skin with a 3D-gradient-illumination-based method. We believe that our system has great potential for early-stage diagnosis and monitoring of skin diseases, especially in vastly populated or underdeveloped areas.

X-ray ptychography is one of the versatile techniques for nanometer resolution imaging. The magnitude of the diffraction patterns is recorded on a detector, and the phase of the diffraction patterns is estimated using phase retrieval techniques. Most phase retrieval algorithms make the solution well-posed by relying on the constraints imposed by the overlapping region between neighboring diffraction pattern samples. As the overlap between neighboring diffraction patterns reduces, the problem becomes ill-posed, and the object cannot be recovered. To avoid the ill-posedness, we investigate the effect of regularizing the phase retrieval algorithm with image priors for various overlap ratios between the neighboring diffraction patterns. We show that the object can be faithfully reconstructed at low overlap ratios by regularizing the phase retrieval algorithm with image priors such as Total-Variation prior and Structure Tensor Prior. We also show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm on real data acquired from an IC chip with a coherent X-ray beam.

The acquisition model of a 3Dx-ray imaging system can be understood as the combination of two known techniques: tomography and ptychography. First, x-rays go through a 3D object producing a set of 2D tomographic projections at different angles. Then, a detector captures the magnitude of a diffraction pattern produced by the interaction of these projections with a finite-sized coherent beam spot (also called probe). In 2D ptychography, in order to solve this phase retrieval problem, the observations have to be captured with a large overlap between them. However, this constraint can be relaxed in 3Dx-ray imaging, due to the fact that most of the required redundant information is acquired thanks to the combination of tomography and ptychography. In this work, we address the so-called ptycho-tomography problem and introduce a 3D reconstruction method that uses the gradient descent algorithm. In the experimental section, the proposed method is evaluated and compared against state-of-art-methods.