Ren Ng, a Ph.D student in the Computer Science department at Stanford says, “For my dissertation I’ve been working on ways of capturing more information about the light inside a camera for enhanced digital photography. My work has spanned both practical and theoretical elements of the problem. On the practical side, we’ve written a paper about a camera that samples the full 4D light field inside the camera in a single photographic exposure. We show that you can use such data to refocus the acquired photograph at different depths after the exposure. The images above, which are focused at different depths, were computed from a single exposure of a prototype camera that we built. We’ve used the prototype to shoot hundreds of light fields. My collaborators on this project were Mathieu Brédif, Gene Duval, and Professors Marc Levoy, Mark Horowitz and Pat Hanrahan.”
Read their paper and see more sample images at the project home page. Don’t miss his paper on Fourier Slice Photography, either!
Gimme Gimme Gimme!