Computer generated rainbow hologram

ABSTRACT (Presented at SPIE Photonics China, SPIE Proceedings of Holographic Displays and Optical Elements,Nov. 1996.)

We propose a simplified model to calculate the computer generated rainbow hologram fast. The rainbow hologram is very practical to display three dimensional images because the images can be reconstructed by white light. Since the rainbow hologram has horizontal parallax only, less computation is required compared with full parallax transmission holograms. In the proposed method, we can simply generate the final hologram from intermediate data, whose total number of samples can be less than one tenth of the final hologram. This intermediate format makes fast computation and effective storage/transmission possible. It can be done only multiple and additional operation to convert the intermediate data to the final data. Therefore, it is possible that a hardware implementation to the electro-holographic display or printer. In this paper, we will discuss both theory for the simplified model and experimental results of white light reconstructed images. Full color holograms are also discussed.