Direct light field rendering without 2D image generation

Rapid developments in 3D display technologies have enabled consumers to enjoy 3D environments in an increasingly immersive manner through various display systems such as stereoscopic, multiview, and light field displays. However, there is a corresponding increase in the complexity of the conventional multiview rendering process in the attempt to achieve a sufficient level of reality, which may hinder the further commercial viability of 3D display products based on such a conventional approach. This paper proposes a novel method, the so‐called direct light field rendering, which can compose the display 3D panel image without reconstructing all the multiview images beforehand. Interpreting the 3D display as sampling in the light field domain, we attempt to directly compute only the necessary samples, not the entire light fields or multiview images. Our proposed algorithm involves the solving of linear systems of two variables, thereby requiring remarkably low computational complexities. Experimental results show that the computation time and memory usage remain as little as 12% and 1% of those required by the conventional one.