Display Pipeline

Figure 1: A high level illustration of the display pipeline. It begins with scene geometry on the left and ends at observer.

The process of displaying a 3D image on an autostereoscopic display is displayed in Figure 1. Information about the scene, which can be represented as light fields or traditional computer graphics models is piped through a rendering process which outputs an image composed of hexagonal subimages. This composited image goes through a calibration function which warps the image. The calibration function's parameters are set during a calibration phase with an appropriate calibration image. After warping, the display image is sent to the display device, where it is viewed by an observer. The two critical steps in this pipeline are the calibration and rendering steps. Calibration bridges the gap between world coordinates as observed by a viewer, and the image coordinates. Rendering images resamples the plenoptic function, which is represented explicitly as a light field or implicitly by geometry. The resampled light field is parameterized by the description of the display device.