Light Field Photography
While going for lunch, one of my colleaugeus asked us if we know about Light Field PHotography. None of us had really heard about it. He said that it's a new kind of photography that a person named, Ren Ng pioneered in his PhD thesis at Standford Univerisity.
Ren Ng | Lytro
(Before you wonder why I didn't post this in the Photography section, please read through first and you'll see that the idea is so unique and that there is so much science into it rather than art. When the art comes, then it will be in the photography section.)
Anyway, Light Field crudely refers to the wave nature of light which is electromagnetic radiation. When you say Light Field Photography, it means that you record every information from light coming in all directions from a scene you would like to photography, eg. Amplitude, Wavelength, and Phase. With these, you can reconstruct the image and you can have all kinds of images from the scence. FOR INSTANCE IF YOU HAVE A LIGHT FIELD PHOTO OF A PERSON IN FRONT OF A TREE, YOU CAN RECONSTRUCT AN IMAGE WHERE THE PERSON IS IN FOCUS AND ANOTHER IMAGE WHERE THE TREE BEHIND THE PERSON IS IN FOCUS!
My other colleague and I agreed (all of us are physicists!) and thought that this is impossible. You would need a next generation photo diode that is probably alien-tech! The only way for this to be possible is if you take a regular camera (perhaps a DSLR), then you scan the focus maybe from 1m to infinity. While doing this, you record a video! You can then do some image processing from the frames of the video, if you want to choose a frame with the focused object that you desire. With this in mind, we didn't believe our colleague until we read the PhD thesis of Ren Ng! And this we did! After reading and understand what he did, we were amazed!!!
Behold, the future of photography, Light Field Photography! It's not really the real light field camera as what I originally described but it's as close as it can get.
Light Field camera | Lytro
Light Field camera | Lytro
Science Inside | Lytro
Basically with their camera, you can just take one image which contains all information. YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO FOCUS YOUR CAMERA AGAIN!!! Ok, how does it work? Here is where the unique novelty comes in! For our traditional photography, we need to move the focus plane to focus on a certain object at some distance. This we do by either moving the image sensor, lens objective, or the both at the same time.
But what Ren Ng, pioneered in his PhD is a unique objective lens coupled with a microlens array that allows simultaneous recording of all possible images focused at different distances!!!
Every microlens records side by side all possible images with different focusing distances for a small part of the scene. The microlens array generates several 2D array of images each just for one scene. The image below on the left shows a raw Light Field Photo. THe image on the right shows an image recorded from one microlens. Ren Ng, then combined all images into one image with the desired focused object. THe user just has to select a region where he wants to focus, then Ren's algorithm recombines the images from all microlenses to form the final image!
You can play around with their sample gallery! It's really cool! It's not yet the perfect Light Field Camera but it's an amazing innovation!!
Picture Gallery | Lytro
If you want to know more, Ren Ng has his PhD thesis available for anyone.
http://www.lytro.com/renng-thesis.pdf
What's also amazing is their advisory team are series people in the scientific world. Recognize Arno Penzias? He shared a Nobel prized for the discovery of the Cosmis wave background.
Advisory Board | Lytro
Light Field Photography
Originally Posted by jofer
very nice app or whatever you call it.photography 102 na ni.di na mag agi ug 101.
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