Communications of the ACM
Multiview 3-D Photography Made Simple
Because a light-field camera captures information about not only the intensity of light rays but also their angle of arrival, the images it produces can be refocused later.
Credit: Kshitij Marwah
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Camera Culture Group have developed a system called Focii that helps users transform a regular camera into a light-field camera that can record high-resolution, multiview images.
Light-field cameras record information not only on light ray intensity, but also their angle of arrival, thereby enabling images to be refocused later. However, existing light-field cameras lose significant resolution in exchange for the angle information.
Focii uses software and a small rectangle of plastic film with a unique checkerboard pattern that fits under the lens of a regular digital single-lens-reflex camera. Focii represents a light field as a grid of square patches, with each patch containing a five-by-five grid of blocks and each block providing a different perspective on a 121-pixel light field patch. This allows Focii to capture 25 perspectives, with the critical part being a unique method of representing the grid of patches corresponding to any given light field.
Focii complements the Camera Culture Group’s ongoing research on glasses-free three-dimensional displays, says MIT's Gordon Wetzstein. "The future vision would be to have a completely integrated pipeline from live-action shooting to editing to display," Wetzstein says. "We’re developing core technologies for that pipeline."
From MIT News
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