Computer-Generated Holography (CGH) algorithms simulate numerical diffraction, being applied in particular for holographic display technology. Due to the wave-based nature of diffraction, CGH is highly computationally intensive, making it especially challenging for driving high-resolution displays in real-time. To this end, we propose a technique for efficiently calculating holograms of 3D line segments. We express the solutions analytically and devise an efficiently computable approximation suitable for massively parallel computing architectures. The algorithms are implemented on a GPU (with CUDA), and we obtain a 70-fold speedup over the reference point-wise algorithm with almost imperceptible quality loss. We report real-time frame rates for CGH of complex 3D line-drawn objects, and validate the algorithm in both a simulation environment as well as on a holographic display setup.

Computer-generated holograms (CGHs) are a key technology in electroholography systems; however, heavy calculations are required to calculate CGHs. We review fast calculation techniques for CGH calculation of a point-light-source-based model, which is a simple and general model of a three-dimensional object in an electroholography system. To reduce the calculation time, many methods that reduce the temporal and spatial redundancy of the CGH calculation have been developed (e.g., look-up table method, the wavefront recording plane method, and other approximation techniques). The implementation of such methods on parallel computers (e.g., graphic processing unit and field programmable gate arrays) has also been reported.

Computer-generated holograms (CGHs) are core technology in electroholography systems; however, heavy and enormous calculations are required for calculating CGH. We have developed algorithms for decreasing the computational cost in CGH. We introduce three of our works for the rapid calculation of CGHs and compare the results.