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New Technique Creates 3D Images Through a Single Lens
Zothecula writes "A team at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has come up with a promising new way to create 3D images from a stationary camera or microscope with a single lens. Rather than expensive hardware, the technique uses a mathematical model to generate images with depth and could find use in a wide range of applications, from creating more compelling microscopy imaging to a more immersive experience in movie theaters."
"Harvard researchers have found a way to create 3D images by juxtaposing two images taken from the same angle but with different focus depths"
We don't care too much how the wonks do it as long as it doesn't involve headgear beyond what moviegoers walk into the theater with.
The result does not impress me
http://us.toshiba.com/spectacle/
"students use focus stacking to make wobble gifs" would have really captured the meat of the article in a single sentence.
as were several other articles in the past few days on Slashdot...
Saarland University developed a reconfigurable camera add-on, the kaleidocam which can do 3D as well as many other things. It allows you to take a single picture that is split by the device into multiple images that appear on the sensor as an array of smaller images. Possible functions include:
Of course, this requires a single shot using a fancy lens, whereas the Harvard technique needs two frames but "no unusual hardware or fancy lenses".
Ask me about repetitive DNA
There is nothing new under the sun or on Slashdot.
I'm impressed it's ONLY 12 hours old.
Isn't this what Lytro has been doing for a while now?
Having two lenses is not a requirement to capture stereoscopic images. It can be done with a single (big) lens, and two slightly different sensor locations. But you're limited by the distance between those two sensors, and a single large lens isn't necessarily cheaper or easier to use than two smaller ones.
What this system does is use the out-of-focus areas as a sort of "displaced" sensor - like moving the sensor within a small circle, still inside the projection cone of the lens - and therefore simulating two (or more) images captured at the edges of the lens.
But, unless the lens is wider than the distance between two eyes, you can't really use this to create realistic stereoscopic images at a macroscopic scale. The information is simply not there. Even if you can extract accurate depth information, that is not quite the same as 3D. A Z-buffer is not a 3D scene; it's not sufficient for functional stereoscopy.
Microscopy is a different matter. In fact, there are already several stereoscopic microscopes and endoscopes that use a single lens to capture two images (with offset sensors). Since the subject is very small, the parallax difference between the two images can be narrower than the width of the lens and still produce a good 3D effect. Scaling that up to macroscopic photography would require lenses wider than a human head.
where the man claimed to have made a DIY Lens that could capture 3d and a program that would create a displacement map out of it. His videos were pretty convincing and he could relight in post processing and such things. He'd tried to sell his lens but it was a failure. His blog is still active, here's the archives http://blogs.wefrag.com/divide/2006/02/ but all the links to the videos and pictures are dead.
I wonder if you could use this technique to form 3D pictures of various stellar phenomena, like say the crab nebula.
It is a cool idea but they are rotating the "3D" image about 1 degree. If they had even halfway good 3D data they could have rotated a whole lot more. My guess is that after 1 degree their "3D" turns into a spiky mess. Man I am getting sick of this popular science news, "Science has way to make flying cars a reality in 5 years."
I am not doubting that 3D information can be extracted from focal data, I am doubting that these guys can do it.
The technique is not even new. I know this because I wrote code to do exactly this back in 1994. And I didn't even event the basic idea of what I was doing.
A. Orth and K. B. Crozier, "Light field moment imaging", non paywalled version:
From Crozier's web page: http://crozier.seas.harvard.edu/publications-1/2013/76_Orth_OL_2013.pdf
So commentators here can be a little more informed about what these guys are really doing. From quick reading, I'm not an expert but this is different from the usual depth from defocus. It allows for some 3D information but not a lot, obviously. Still could be useful.
All the best.