Abstract
Computer-generated holography (CGH) simulates the propagation and interference of complex light waves, allowing it to reconstruct realistic images captured from a specific viewpoint by solving the corresponding Maxwell equations. However, in applications such as virtual and augmented reality, viewers should freely observe holograms from arbitrary viewpoints, much as how we naturally see the physical world. In this work, we train a neural network to generate holograms at any view in a scene. Our result is the Neural Holographic Field: the first artificial-neural-network-based representation for light wave propagation in free space and transform sparse 2D photos into holograms that are not only 3D but also freely viewable from any perspective. We demonstrate by visualizing various smartphone-captured scenes from arbitrary six-degree-of-freedom viewpoints on a prototype holographic display. To this end, we encode the measured light intensity from photos into a neural network representation of underlying wavefields. Our method implicitly learns the amplitude and phase surrogates of the underlying incoherent light waves under coherent light display conditions. During playback, the learned model predicts the underlying continuous complex wavefront propagating to arbitrary views to generate holograms.
