Image enhancement in projectors via optical pixel shift and overlay

Earlier work has explored enhancing the perceived resolution of a display by shifting multiple different low-resolution images by fractions of a pixel and overlaying them in a temporally multiplexed fashion. This increases the manufacturing cost and also sacrifices the temporal resolution that can compromise other capabilities like 3D active stereo. In this paper we propose a method to achieve the same goal in projectors by performing the pixel shift and superposition optically by introducing a simple and inexpensive optical ensemble of a set of lenses on the projector light path. This does not sacrifice the temporal resolution and is extremely easy to implement in practice. However, instead of overlaying different images, we overlay an image with one or more sub-pixel shifted copies of itself. Therefore, we seek a single n×n image which when shifted and overlaid with itself creates a perceptually closer to a higher resolution 2n × 2n target image. This changes the optimization formulation significantly and requires solving a system of sparse linear equations. We take advantage of this sparsity and design a parallel implementation of this optimization in GPUs for real-time computation of the input image critical for its practical implementation. But, since this system is more constrained that using multiple overlaid images, the enhancement of resolution is compromised. However, since the optical design is very simple and inexpensive, it can be deployed on a variety of low-cost projectors and still offer a significant image quality benefit.