Joseph Allen
Freshmen Imaging Project
10/09/2012
Light Field Imaging
Written Précis I
Ng, Ren, Marc Levoy, Gene Duval, Mark Horowitz, and Pat Hanrahan. "Light Field
Photography with a Hand-held Plenoptic Camera." Classes.soe.ucsc.edu. Stanford
University / Duval Design, Feb. 2005. Web. 9 Nov. 2012.
<http://classes.soe.ucsc.edu/cmps290b/Fall05/readings/lfcamera-150dpi.pdf>.
In the Stanford paper, the writer(s) seemed to gravitate to talking primarily about
the camera they made and the group’s personal experience, and other works they based
their project off of, which isn’t exactly the most useful, seeing how their project was
conducted seven years ago, and the works they based their camera off of are now a few
decades old. Although the plenoptic camera this paper is about isn’t exactly he most
current, up to date version out there, this paper does an outstanding job of explaining a lot
of the principles and process behind plenoptics, in a way that’s more basic an easy to pick
up on. The Stanford paper explains not only the significance and how-to aspects of
collecting the locational and angular information, but also their paramount role in the
annotating and repositioning of light rays for the 4D presence of the rendering. The paper
goes on to explain the ability of the plenoptic camera to overcome the age-old camera
debacle of having to sacrifice depth of field or aperture size, and never getting to have a
favorable amount of both at the same time. The set up for one of these plenoptic cameras
is described as being essentially the same as the setup for any other type of
everyday/household/non-specialty camera, but with a set of smaller microlenses built in
between the photo-sensor and the camera’s main lens. In order to preform the necessary
refocusing for a plenoptic camera, a special algorithm or equation is often needed. Three
factors that can attribute to the occurrence of blurring and distorting in plenoptic cameras
consist of diffraction blur patterns, complications with micro lenses, and multiple rays of
light competing for the same pixels. Although a portion of the information in this paper is
a bit more basic and/or dated, it should all be relatively trustworthy considering the
tremendous amount of reference sources used by the Stanford scientists. Unlike certain
other papers, this one made sure to highlight as many possible obstacles and/or design
problems that could potentially arise, opposed to pretending like the project they built
was absolutely flawless and superior in every way. Although the multiple camera array
the class is building probably wont experience too many of the problems this paper
cautions about, the Stanford scientists who wrote it at very least, had the right
methodology in place regarding the acknowledgment of their projects shortcomings, how
to identify them properly and plan around what’s real instead of what’s ideal; which
truthfully, is a concept our group could stand to work on and try an get better about.