Abstract
Recently, great progress has been made in the research of cylindrical holography as a promising technique of 360 degrees display. However, there is an unsolved issue of occlusion culling, which is critical to cylindrical holography and degrades the reconstructed images due to overlapping. To our knowledge, the occlusion issue in cylindrical holography has never been deeply discussed. In this paper, a method of occlusion culling is proposed for computer-generated cylindrical holograms based on a horizontal optical-path-limit function. In cylindrical diffraction, the propagation characteristics of light waves can be described by the point spread function, which is mainly obtained by analyzing the meaning of the obliquity factor in the concentric cylinder model. Different from the planar diffraction, the diffraction area of each source point is limited within the tangents in cylindrical diffraction. Therefore, a horizontal optical path limit function that acts directly on the point spread function for occlusion culling is established. Besides, the proposed method can be applied to the three-dimensional object by using the layer-oriented method. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed occlusion culling method is verified by the numerical simulation results and error analysis of the reconstructed images. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement.