Neural Light Field 3D Printing

Quan Zheng1, Vahid Babaei1, Gordon Wetzstein2, Hans-Peter Siedel1 Matthias Zwicker3 Gurprit Singh1
1Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, 2 Stanford University, USA, 3University of Maryland, College Park, USA
SIGGRAPH ASIA 2020 / ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 39 issue 6
Snow
We propose a novel approach to 3D print light fields as attenuation-based volumetric displays, for which we end-to-end optimize a neural network based implicit representation in a continuous space.

Abstract

Modern 3D printers are capable of printing large-size light-field displays at high-resolutions. However, optimizing such displays in full 3D volume for a given light-field imagery is still a challenging task. Existing light field displays optimize over relatively small resolutions using a few co-planar layers in a 2.5D fashion to keep the problem tractable. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end optimization approach that encodes input light field imagery as a continuous-space implicit representation in a neural network. This allows fabricating high-resolution, attenuation-based volumetric displays that exhibit the target light fields. In addition, we incorporate the physical constraints of the material to the optimization such that the result can be printed in practice. Our simulation experiments demonstrate that our approach brings significant visual quality improvement compared to the multilayer and uniform grid-based approaches. We validate our simulations with fabricated prototypes and demonstrate that our pipeline is flexible enough to allow fabrications of both planar and non-planar displays.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the anonymous reviewers for shaping the final version of the paper.

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