Recently developed integral imaging techniques are reviewed. Integral imaging captures and reproduces the light rays from the object space, enabling the acquisition and the display of the three-dimensional information of the object in an efficient way. Continuous effort on integral imaging has been improving the performance of the capture and display process in various aspects, including distortion, resolution, viewing angle, and depth range. Digital data processing of the captured light rays can now visualize the three-dimensional structure of the object with a high degree of freedom and enhanced quality. This recent progress is of high interest for both industrial applications and academic research.

A novel system of optical see-through augmented reality (AR) is proposed by making use of a holographic optical element (HOE) with full-color and lens-array functions. The full-color lens-array HOE provides see-through property with three-dimensional (3D) virtual images, for it functions as a conventional lens array only for Bragg-matched lights. An HOE recording setup was built, and it recorded a 30 mm × 60 mm sized full-color lens-array HOE by using the techniques of spatial multiplexing for large-area recording and wavelength multiplexing for full-color imaging. The experimental results confirm that the suggested full-color lens-array HOE can provide the full-color 3D virtual images in the optical see-through AR system.

Despite steady technological progress, displays are still subject to inherent limitations in resolution improvement and pixel miniaturization because a series of colours is generally expressed by a combination of at least three primary colour pixels. Here we propose a structure comprising a metal cavity and a nanoaperture, which we refer to as a cavity-aperture, to simultaneously control the colour and intensity of transmitted light in a single pixel. The metal cavity constructs plasmonic standing waves to organize the spatial distribution of amplitudes according to wavelength, and the nanoaperture permits light with a specific wavelength and amplitude to pass through it, depending on the nanoaperature's relative position in the cavity and the polarization state of the incident light. Therefore, the cavity-aperture has the potential to function as a dynamic colour pixel. This design method may be helpful in developing various photonic devices, such as micro-imaging systems and multiplexed sensors.

We proposed a reconstruction method for the occluded region of three-dimensional (3D) object using the depth extraction based on the optical flow and triangular mesh reconstruction in integral imaging. The depth information of sub-images from the acquired elemental image set is extracted using the optical flow with sub-pixel accuracy, which alleviates the depth quantization problem. The extracted depth maps of sub-image array are segmented by the depth threshold from the histogram based segmentation, which is represented as the point clouds. The point clouds are projected to the viewpoint of center sub-image and reconstructed by the triangular mesh reconstruction. The experimental results support the validity of the proposed method with high accuracy of peak signal-to-noise ratio and normalized cross-correlation in 3D image recognition.

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