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Refocusable Plenoptic Light-Field Photography

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the expensive-toys-to-break dept.

virgil_disgr4ce writes "Wired is reporting that a Stanford student using about 90,000 microlenses has developed a plenoptic camera whose images can be refocused, via software, after they are exposed." From the article: "'We just think it'll lead to better cameras that make it easier to take pictures that are in focus and look good,' said Ng's adviser, Stanford computer science professor Pat Hanrahan."

6 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. innovation by Lord+Ender · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As soon as I heard of this, I immediately realized how to do it. But I would not have thought to do it on my own. This kind of smart thinking is why we have a patent system. The patent system was not designed to protect business methods, such as completing a sale using n clicks instead of n+1.

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  2. Re:It's fun. by mabinogi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    More to the point - what we see with one eye.

    With two eyes you can already see the effect - holding a hand in front of your face doesn't stop you seeing what's behind it until you completely cover both eyes, etc.

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    Advanced users are users too!
  3. Getting the least out of your 16MB camera by Tsar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, the plenoptic camera has some neat benefits, including the ability to reconstruct the field of view from the perspective of any point on its objective lens. But for the image to contain all that information, it by necessity does NOT contain information that it otherwise would--in this case, resolution.

    Look at the sample images. Even the sharpest-focused regions are soft-focused. This is a 16-megapixel camera with an effective resolution less than 1/3 that of VGA. Granted, the images can be refocused and depth information can be extracted, but do you really want to have to buy a 188-megapixel plenoptic camera to get sharp 1-megapixel images? Is focusing really that hard?

    1. Re:Getting the least out of your 16MB camera by Viceice · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You obviously aren't a photographer. Many award winning shots are accidents. Taken during such times where, for example, a photographer is running for his life in a hail of bullets, simply pressing the shutter as he runs, not even looking in the viewfinder.

      What I'm getting at is, some moments happen in literally in the blink of an eye and they only happen once in a lifetime. So in that split second where you are trying to take a shot and have no time to double check, won't you be sorely disappointed if your ticket to a Pulitzer was ruined by the wrong f-stop setting? Or the wrong focus?

      Back in the day of 8mb CF cards, a 6megapixel 6mb RAW was insane. But in this day of 4GB CF and memory prices what they are, 6 or even 16 mb RAWs are but a drop in the bucket. Heck even with today's memory capacities, if you had a camera that produced a 188mb RAW, it'd still be perfectly acceptable to any photographer, considering the possibilities for photography this new technology gives you.

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  4. Re:You don't really lose resolution by (negative+video) · · Score: 4, Insightful
    The best way to think of it is take a standard good quality camera with big pixels, subdivide each pixel into a grid of 12x12 or so tiny pixels - more like the size of pixels in cell phone cameras - and put a microlens over it. You get ... roughly the same noise characteristics, ...
    The space between the pixels tends to be hard to shrink, so as you add pixels an ever-increasing fraction of the image sensor tends to become dead zones. Using Foveon-style stacked detectors instead of a filter mosaic would, of course, help quite a bit.

    A question: can you refocus colors independently to correct chromatic abberation of the lens?

  5. Idea has no practical application! by Crspe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I saw this article about a week back. I am quite sure that this will never see a practical application ... They take a 16MP input image to produce a 0.08MP output image!!! They are using a $15000 camera system to produce images one quarter the size of VGA!!! Say what you want, but there are better ways to improve DOF.

    They reduce resolution by a factor of 180, but only improve depth-of-field by a factor 7. This is particularly silly because the only reason they have a bad depth-of-field is because they are using a huge expensive sensor. If they would switch to a small cheap sensor like you find in any cheap digicam (1/1.8"), they would get the same improvement, and save $14800.

    The light-performace of this small sensor would be just as good as their large one - if you use the same huge pixels that they do (to produce a 0.08MP image), you will get the same low light performance.

    If you want more details on why this idea has no use, check out this thread:
    http://luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?show topic=9354

    Interesting article, no practical application.