Lippman integral photography

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PinkysBrain

Lippman integral photography

Post by PinkysBrain »

Was looking around if anyone had ever done integral imaging with pinhole arrays and stumbled on this interesting bit of historical work from 1911, translated by some kind souls.

P.P. Sokolov’s Historical Work on Light Field Photography/Integral Imaging.

I thought it was interesting, know of anyone who's tried to reproduce this method?
favalora

Lippman integral photography

Post by favalora »

Interesting, I hadn't seen that paper before, nor heard of PP Sokolov. I generally rely on Benton's Selected Papers on Three-dimensional Displays for the historical stuff, but that wasn't cited in it.

Did you already see the Lanman/Hirsch/Kim/Raskar paper on unusual parallax-barrier displays? http://web.media.mit.edu/~mhirsch/hr3d/. It is not the Sokolov work, but something in that vein.

You might want to check out the LinkedIn group "Non-Glasses 3D Display Technology." Usually it focuses on news in 3D display, but now and then people post historical things too.

g
dannybee
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Lippman integral photography

Post by dannybee »

favalora wrote:Interesting, I hadn't seen that paper before, nor heard of PP Sokolov. I generally rely on Benton's Selected Papers on Three-dimensional Displays for the historical stuff, but that wasn't cited in it.

Did you already see the Lanman/Hirsch/Kim/Raskar paper on unusual parallax-barrier displays? http://web.media.mit.edu/~mhirsch/hr3d/. It is not the Sokolov work, but something in that vein.

You might want to check out the LinkedIn group "Non-Glasses 3D Display Technology." Usually it focuses on news in 3D display, but now and then people post historical things too.

g
yes i have a 3d monitor based on this idea its iZ3d
PinkysBrain

Lippman integral photography

Post by PinkysBrain »

favalora wrote:Did you already see the Lanman/Hirsch/Kim/Raskar paper on unusual parallax-barrier displays? http://web.media.mit.edu/~mhirsch/hr3d/. It is not the Sokolov work, but something in that vein.
This reminds me of an Asian company which also claimed to use dual LCDs together with 4D matrix optimization to do autostereoscopy ... but I can't remember which company :/

PS. found it, remembered it was something with Sunny ... actually wasn't Asian though ... Sunny Ocean.
Martin

Lippman integral photography

Post by Martin »

PinkysBrain wrote:Was looking around if anyone had ever done integral imaging with pinhole arrays and stumbled on this interesting bit of historical work from 1911, translated by some kind souls.

P.P. Sokolov’s Historical Work on Light Field Photography/Integral Imaging.

I thought it was interesting, know of anyone who's tried to reproduce this method?
I wasn't aware of pinhole arrays in that context.
I however recall some attempts to combine integral photography with holography. De Montebello comes to my mind (see e.g. US 3,533,690). And it looks like there had been some activity in that direction at Polaroid.
In SPIE 523 (1985) James Cowan describes the making of "The Holographic Honeycomb Microlens". It was made by a three beam setup to generate a hexagonal array. In one paragraph, "the fly's eye array - three-dimensional imaging", he writes:
Of the many devices that have been investigated for three-dimensional imaging, one of the most interesting is the fly's eye array. An alternative to holography, this invention of Lippmann's, which is over 75 years old, has been studied for many years; most recently, and probably most successfully, by deMontebello. Wide angle integral photography, as it has been termed by deMontebello, has two significant advantages over present-day holography: it can use ordinary incoherent light as a source, and it can record images in their full natural colors. Why then has it not received wider use or acceptance? One of the difficulties is the nature of the fly's eye array itself and also the nature of the recording. To avoid a pseudoscopic image using a positive array of lenslets two recordings must be made. The second recording must be made through a fly's eye array similar to the first one, and in perfect register with it. If the array itself is not perfect, then considerable image degradation results.

DeMontebello was able to solve the registration problem by using large lenslets and restricted apertures. To make the lenslets he used an array of closely -packed spherical ball bearings. In one step of this process the emulsion itself is embossed with this array, an ingenious procedure that happens to eliminate the image "flipping" that is usually associated with lenticular photography. But the striking disadvantage of deMontebello's process is that the fly's eye array is annoyingly visible. One of the reasons for this visibility is that in the embossing process the space between the spheres becomes "dead" space; that is, light that strikes this area is not imaged, and is lost.

If all the surface of the fly's eye array could be utilized to collect light, then a significant improvement in the image quality might indeed result. For this purpose we would make a microlens having a much larger spacing than the one used for the CPC.
Dinesh

Lippman integral photography

Post by Dinesh »

Martin wrote:De Montebello comes to my mind
Interesting! I have the original method of Lippmann and a friend of mine and I tried this method; actually he thought of it. We did this about 2 years ago with no idea that someone else had done the same thing (not that we looked very hard for "prior art"). Our problem was the same as DeMontebello. My role was simply to provide a gelatin layer on a sheet of glass. My friend slightly softened the gelatin and emedded the microlens array and then did the actual photography. He got some results but neither of us was happy since the lenslets were "annoyingly visible" for the same reason - the dead space between spheres. In addition simply placing the micro-lenses onto the gelatin resulted in differing depths of penetration of the bearings, with the result that the focal points of the microlenses was not planar. The image was clearly there, but highly aberrated. I suggested that if we could use the cross-linking property of gelatin to selectively cross link the spaces between the lenslets, thus creating a sort of "pseudo-lens" between the actual microlenses and even out the dicontinuities, then we might be able to mitigate the failures a little. The basic idea being that we let the micro-lenses themselves "tell" us where the discontinuities were by diverting light to the dead areas between the microlenses in an exact proportion to the space between the lenses. We've never actually done this however, because we were upended by Apple ( http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/12/01 ... d-hurdles/ ). It's not quite Lippmann, but I suspect it's close enough since the language does include an actual real lenslet, but implies that it does not actually have to be a "software" lens.
PinkysBrain

Lippman integral photography

Post by PinkysBrain »

Hmm? Apple's patent concerns reflective lenticular arrays ... also I really doubt they can actually build it, the precision needed for the projection is incredible (Apple is becoming a bit of a patent troll lately, they have gotten some patents on wedge displays too for instance ... a technology for which the fundamental patents are owned by someone working at Microsoft).
Dinesh

Lippman integral photography

Post by Dinesh »

I agree. The Apple patent probably cannot be built. However, they have what looks like a prominent lens on the diagram. While you and I know it's a lenticular on edge, it certainly looks to the untrained eye like a circular lens. Maybe that's deliberate. I haven't actually read the patent in detail, but if anyone tried to actually commercialise a screen based on Lippmann's principle Apple's lawyers may (stress: may) take notice. The problem with this sort of scenario is that right and wrong matter less than the relative cost of your lawyers against Apple's lawyers. While it may be unfair, in today's world it's the lynchpin of capitalism - got an idea? patent it! even if it can't be done. Some bright spark somewhere may be able to do it and then "we" have to buy it off them. If "we" patent it, and someone does build it, "we" have the license rights! At any rate, I had no intention of commercialising it, but my friend may have had. As soon as he saw the Apple patent, he dropped the whole thing. Since it was his idea, I never pursued it further.
favalora

Lippman integral photography

Post by favalora »

I read the Apple patent-application in detail within the last 12 months, and I recall that it employs a corrugated mirrored surface. There is a significant amount of prior art in that domain, stretching back significantly far.

g
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