Slashdot Mirror

Plenoptic imaging or Wavefront coding methods can be used to achieve greater depth and lens speed by exploiting redundancy in the pixel count.

Only if you are using the pixels for pure imaging. Several techniques such as cubic phase mask techniques http://www.cdm-optics.com/site/wf_overview.php use the spare pixels for wavefront sensing allowing tremendous depth of focus with fixed low f/# lenses via postprocesing.

While simply rapming up the megapixel count and using conventional lenses will actually degrade image quality, use of coputational imaging technologies such as cubic phase masks http://www.cdm-optics.com/site/index.php has the potential to increase image quality over conventional cameras.

Put simply cubic phase masks deliberately blur images in a fashion which allows for the sampling of the wavefront. Thus by tossing a lot of pixels and computational power at deblurring, a batter image than possible with conventional optics is possible. And yes, they are working on a cell phone version.

I'm not enough of a scientist/mathematician to know the answer, but this sounds very similar to "wavefront coding" from the U. of Colorado.

This is already being used commercially, and the company was formed in 1996 - so I assume the research substantially pre-dated that.

http://www.cdm-optics.com/site/

        BugBear