We have developed a wide viewing VA-LCD system with the microstructure film. This film is attached on LC panel and scatters incident lights from LC panel by reflection at internal air cavities to improve the viewing angle characteristics. In this system, we have optimized LC alignment directions and BL distribution as well as the scattering profile of the film. LC panel has two-domain LC aligned pixel (each LC director is antiparallel in vertical direction) and wide viewing angle in horizontal direction. Backlight distribution is collimated to horizontal direction. To distribute lights in horizontal direction to vertical direction, we designed and fabricated the microstructure film which had rhombus shaped air cavities. This display system indicated smaller color shift and higher CR at oblique angles than the conventional VA-LCD; the color shift from the normal direction (Δu'v') at θ= 60° was reduced by 60% and the CR was over 100:1 at all directions.

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A novel azobenzene compound for isomerization type photoalignment film has been developed. It has 4-aminophenethyl groups at both sides of azobenzene core. Photoalignment film (PAF) containing it shows high transmittance and almost the same alignment-ability compared with our conventional isomerization type PAF.

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Stereoscopic video technology, which enables three-dimensional (3D) images to be displayed, has been developing rapidly. However, existing devices are unable to achieve accurate color reproduction. This paper proposes a method to accurately reproduce the colors displayed by a multiband 3D projector. Previously, we proposed a stereoscopic display system with an expanded color gamut. However, we only confirmed the expansion of the color gamut of the proposed system and were unable to display stereoscopic images with accurate colors. We now propose an accurate color and spectral reproduction method for a stereoscopic image display system for which we developed an expanded color gamut by means of the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). The system design for optimizing the color reproduction of the multiband 3D projector is described. An experimental evaluation of the color reproducibility showed the performance of the proposed method to be superior to that of an existing method.

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High dynamic range (HDR) imaging has recently been applied to video systems, including the next-generation ultrahigh definition television (UHDTV) format. This format requires a camera with a dynamic range of over 15 f-stops and an S/N ratio that is the same as that of HDTV systems. However, current UHDTV cameras cannot satisfy these conditions. Thus, we propose a four-chip capturing method that combines three-chip and single-chip systems. A prism divides incident light into two rays. Most of the incident light is directed to the three-chip capturing block; the remainder is directed to a single-chip capturing block. High quality HDR video can then be obtained by synthesizing the images obtained from the two systems. In this paper, we describe the proposed image synthesis method and discuss the results of a simulation used to verify its effectiveness.

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In this paper, we propose a novel method for estimating time-to-contact (TTC) in scattering media environments, such as fog and water. For an object moving towards another object, time-to-contact measures the time remaining until collision. Therefore, it is especially useful for safe automated vehicle navigation in the 3D space. Time-to-contact estimation is advantageous because it does not require camera calibration, freeing it from calibration errors. Earlier studies commonly used geometric features of objects such as edges and points to estimate time-to-contact. In scattering media environments, the degradation of image intensity caused by light scattering makes it difficult to obtain clear geometric features. Thus, in this paper we propose a method for estimating time-to-contact in scattering media by using the photometric features in the image instead. We use statistical priors to obtain depth information from the captured image intensity and compute the time-to-contact from estimated transmission of the media.

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