High-speed surface display through hybrid processing

We propose a high-speed surface reconstruction from three-dimensional data through optical-digital hybrid processing.Surface images are currently reconstructed through digital processing, which takes a long time mainly because of the rotation and interpolation of the volume data. In the proposed system, slice images of threedimensional volume data are optically rotated and interpolated. In principle, one surface image can be obtained in the video rate when we use the same number of sets of optical processors as slices to be processed. Furthermore, this system could lead to a hybrid three-dimensional simulator; most operations such as rotation, cutting, digging holes, and peeling skins are interactively achieved at the video speed. Fundamental experiments are described that confirm the effectiveness of this method.