High-efficient rendering of the multi-view image for the three-dimensional display based on the backward ray-tracing technique

Computer-generated multi-view (MV) image for the three-dimensional (3D) display with lenticular lens arrays based on the backward ray-tracing technique is presented. To overcome the limitations of the traditional ray-tracing technique, whose minimum operating unit is the pixel, the proposed method can be applied at the sub-pixel level. The quality of the generated 3D image is not reduced, in contrast to existing methods for converting 2D images to 3D. Compared to the previous each camera viewpoint independent rendering method, the backward ray-tracing technique directly renders the final MV image rather than all the single-viewpoint images. Accordingly, the total render time is substantially reduced. Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly increases the simplicity and efficiency of the rendering process, especially ensuring the resolution of the final MV 3D image. Experimental results for 3D display with the generated 32-viewpoint 3D images are presented. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.