Light-field Camera

By Author: Nicholas Frost
Total Articles: 8
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The first light field camera was proposed by Gabriel Lippmann in 1908, which used integral photography as the underlying technologies. In 1992, Adelson and Wang proposed the style of a plenoptic camera that can be utilised to drastically decrease the correspondence issue in stereo matching.[1] To obtain this, an array of microlenses is placed at the focal plane of the camera principal lens. The image sensor is positioned slightly behind the microlenses. Applying such images the displacement of image components that are not in focus can be analyzed and depth information and facts can be extracted. Potentially, this camera system can be made use of to refocus an image virtually on a computer right after the picture has been taken, as explained by Ng et al.[2] The drawback of such a system is the low resolution that the final images have. As one particular microlens samples the light directions at one particular spatial point an raise in the quantity of image pixels can only be accomplished by escalating the number of microlenses by the similar quantity.[three] To overcome this limitation, Lumsdaine and Georgiev describe a new ...
... style of a plenoptic camera, referred to as focused plenoptic camera where the microlens array is positioned ahead of or behind the focal plane of the key lens. This modification samples the light field in a various way that allows for a higher spatial resolution by having a reduced angular resolution at the exact same time. With this design and style pictures can be refocused with a a great deal greater spatial resolution. Having said that, the low angular resolution can introduce some unwanted aliasing artifacts. A distinctive style employing low price printed film (mask) alternatively of microlens array was proposed by researchers at MERL in 2007.[four] This style overcomes various limitations of microlens array in terms of chromatic aberrations, loss of boundary pixels, and permits larger spatial resolution photographs to be captured. Even so, a mask primarily based design reduces light compared to microlens arrays.

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From 2010 on, Raytrix has sold quite a few models of plenoptic camera for industrial and scientific applications, with resolutions starting from 1 megapixel.[7][eight]

Lytro was founded by Stanford University Laptop or computer Graphics Laboratory alumnus Ren Ng to commercialize the light field camera he created as a graduate student there. Lytro has created a consumer light-field "digital camera capable of photos utilizing a plenoptic approach.[9]
Other cameras

The Adobe light-field camera is a prototype one hundred-megapixel camera that requires a 3-dimensional photo of the scene in focus using 19 uniquely configured lenses. Each and every lens will take a 5.2 megapixel photo of the whole scene around the camera and each image can be focused later in any way.[ten]

The CAFADIS camera is a plenoptic camera created by the University of La Laguna (Spain).[11] CAFADIS stands (in Spanish) for phase-distance camera, considering the fact that it can be utilized for distance and optical wavefront estimation. From a single shot it can produce many pictures refocused at unique distances, depth maps, all-in-focus pictures and stereo pairs. A comparable optical design and style can also be employed in adaptive optics in astrophysics, in order to appropriate the aberrations caused by atmospheric turbulence in telescope images. In order to carry out these tasks various algorithms, operating on GPU and FPGA, operate on the raw image captured by the camera.

Mitsubishi Electric Study Laboratories's (MERL) light field camera[four] is primarily based on the principle of optical heterodyning and uses a printed film (mask) placed close to the sensor. Any hand-held camera can be converted into a light field camera making use of this technologies by simply inserting a low-expense film on best of the sensor.[12] A mask-primarily based style avoids the dilemma of loss of resolution, considering that a higher-resolution photo can be generated for the focused components of the scene.

Modern approaches to light field acquisition contain mask-primarily based devices that capture an optimized optical projection of a light field and reconstruct the higher-resolution light field through compressive sensing.[13]

Cameras built working with angle-sensitive pixels can perform single-lens, single-sensor 3D photography.[14]
In smartphone

Nokia has invested in Pelican Imaging to produce plenoptic camera system with 16-lens array camera and predicted will be implemented in smartphone in 2014.[15]

Stanford University Computer system Graphics Laboratory has developed a light-field microscope using a microlens array similar to the one particular employed in the light-field camera developed by the lab. The prototype is built about a Nikon Eclipse transmitted light microscope/wide-field fluorescence microscope and typical CCD cameras.