Focus on this


Why bother with autofocus? Still futzing with an old manual focus? Dump both of them in favor of this very cool new invention: A camera that doesn't focus at all!

Why bother with autofocus? Still futzing with an old manual focus? Dump both of them in favor of this very cool new invention: A camera that doesn't focus at all!

This camera lets you change your focus, now get this, after you've taken the picture! Check out the examples (these are all from one picture):


Abstract
This paper presents a camera that samples the 4D light field on its sensor in a single photographic exposure. This is achieved by inserting a microlens array between the sensor and main lens, creating a plenoptic camera. Each microlens measures not just the total amount of light deposited at that location, but how much light arrives along each ray. By re-sorting the measured rays of light to where they would have terminated in slightly different, synthetic cameras, we can compute sharp photographs focused at different depths. We show that a linear increase in the resolution of images under each microlens results in a linear increase in the sharpness of the refocused photographs. This property allows us to extend the depth of field of the camera without reducing the aperture, enabling shorter exposures and lower image noise. Especially in the macrophotography regime, we demonstrate that we can also compute synthetic photographs from a range of different viewpoints. These capabilities argue for a different strategy in designing photographic imaging systems.

To the photographer, the plenoptic camera operates exactly like an ordinary hand-held camera. We have used our prototype to take hundreds of light field photographs, and we present examples of portraits, high-speed action and macro close-ups. 

Posted: Tue - November 22, 2005 at 10:34 PM          

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