Fast virtual view synthesis for an 8K 3D light-field display based on cutoff-NeRF and 3D voxel rendering

Three-dimensional (3D) light-field displays can provide an immersive visual experience, which has attracted significant attention. However, the generating of high-quality 3D light-field content in the real world is still a challenge because it is difficult to capture dense high-resolution viewpoints of the real world with the camera array. Novel view synthesis based on CNN can generate dense high-resolution viewpoints from sparse inputs but suffer from high-computational resource consumption, low rendering speed, and limited camera baseline. Here, a two-stage virtual view synthesis method based on cutoff-NeRF and 3D voxel rendering is presented, which can fast synthesize dense novel views with smooth parallax and 3D images with a resolution of 7680 × 4320 for the 3D light-field display. In the first stage, an image-based cutoff-NeRF is proposed to implicitly represent the distribution of scene content and improve the quality of the virtual view. In the second stage, a 3D voxel-based image rendering and coding algorithm is presented, which quantify the scene content distribution learned by cutoff-NeRF to render high-resolution virtual views fast and output high-resolution 3D images. Among them, a coarse-to-fine 3D voxel rendering method is proposed to improve the accuracy of voxel representation effectively. Furthermore, a 3D voxel-based off-axis pixel encoding method is proposed to speed up 3D image generation. Finally, a sparse views dataset is built by ourselves to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness, which can fast synthesize novel views and 3D images with high resolution in real 3D scenes and physical simulation environments. PSNR of the virtual view is about 29.75 dB, SSIM is about 0.88, and the synthetic 8K 3D image time is about 14.41s. We believe that our fast high-resolution virtual viewpoint synthesis method can effectively improve the application of 3D light field display.