Adaptive super-resolution in integral imaging with a heterogeneous metalens array.

Abstract

Integral imaging (InIm) enables 3D displays with continuous parallax and authentic depth cues, representing a highly promising technical solution for true 3D extended reality (XR) displays. However, it suffers from a fundamental trade-off between spatial resolution and field of view (FOV). This study verifies that a heterogeneous metalens array (MeLA)-based InIm display system, while achieving a wide FOV, possesses inherent subpixel shifts among its elemental images, which hold the potential to recover information beyond the system Nyquist limit. We propose an adaptive super-resolution (SR) method based on local uniform-pattern matching, which delivers up to a two-fold resolution improvement in such a display system without additional dynamic hardware and with no degradation to the FOV. Numerical and optical simulations performed on a system equipped with a 4×16 MeLA and a high-resolution display panel demonstrate that this scheme achieves a wide FOV of 50°, while the peak resolution is boosted from 21 pixels per degree (PPD) to 42 PPD. This method maintains stable resolution enhancement across the full FOV and the entire depth of field (DOF), offering a viable technical pathway for static XR 3D display systems featuring high resolution and a wide FOV.