Study on lens design methods for improving the viewing properties of the integral imaging system degraded by lens-array aberrations

Abstract

Integral imaging (InIm) is a promising three-dimension (3D) display technique because it can display 3D images with vertical and horizontal parallax without the need for any special glasses. InIm requires a lens-array in front of the display panel in order to integrate the elemental images (EI) into the 3D image. Conventionally the elemental lenses have spherical surface profiles, thus they suffer from intrinsic lens aberrations such as spherical aberration and astigmatism. Aberrations affect the ability of the lens to focus light in a single point, or to collimate light from a point source. In InIm, this results in a loss of image quality of the elemental images and reconstructed image due to distortions. The viewing characteristics of the InIm system, such as viewing angle and image resolution, are also affected by aberrations. In this work the author proposes two methods designing aberration-minimized lens-array. The first method is based on the splitting and bending of the lens-arrays elemental lens such that aberration balancing can be achieved. Simulations are performed and the effectiveness of this method is demonstrated by comparing the designed lens-array with a standard spherical lens-array of same properties. In the second method the author describes the design process of a custom aspherical lens-array which has minimum spherical aberration. The design, optimization, and fabrication processes are described. Experiments are presented and compared with the computer simulations. A thorough analysis of the results is performed and solutions to the issues encountered are proposed.