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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."

3 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.

    --
    A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
  2. 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?

  3. 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?