Apple is coming up with cameras which extend this in a pretty cool way: https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2020/04/apple-invents-a-light-field-panorama-camera-system-for-idevices-hmd-that-will-create-immersive-scenes-with-6-degrees-of-fre.html
idontknow
Are there any other interesting things we can do with light field photography other than selective focus?
rgrao
Yeah, lightfield cameras can allow you to get depth maps by using two different techniques: depth from defocus (how sharp different parts of the image are) and depth from correspondences (since we can simulate different viewpoints from different parts of the lightfield). These can also be blended together pretty intelligently, as was shown in this paper here: http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Tao-DFC-2013-12/Tao-DFC-2013-12.pdf. This paper uses the depth from defocus and from correspondences, then runs a Markov Random Field propagation algorithm that improves the estimates based on some loss functions defined with the gradients of the image. This provides them with a really sharp depth map. Another paper called confocal stereo also produces really high quality depth maps by changing both the focus and the aperture, which can also be done with a single lightfield.
graphicstar11
Do professional cameras contain light field cameras?
keenan
@graphicstar11 There was a company called Lytro that made professional-grade (and consumer) lightfield cameras, which got bought by Google. Since then, companies like Google have explored how to incorporate "lightfield-like" features into camera and software designs, in the spirit of computational photography. The founder of Lytro is now a prof at Berkeley, and is hacking on so-called Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) which use machine learning to approximate light fields from images. So, the ideas and technology live on---though I don't know if anyone is building a straightforward lightfield camera these days.
Apple is coming up with cameras which extend this in a pretty cool way: https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2020/04/apple-invents-a-light-field-panorama-camera-system-for-idevices-hmd-that-will-create-immersive-scenes-with-6-degrees-of-fre.html
Are there any other interesting things we can do with light field photography other than selective focus?
Yeah, lightfield cameras can allow you to get depth maps by using two different techniques: depth from defocus (how sharp different parts of the image are) and depth from correspondences (since we can simulate different viewpoints from different parts of the lightfield). These can also be blended together pretty intelligently, as was shown in this paper here: http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Tao-DFC-2013-12/Tao-DFC-2013-12.pdf. This paper uses the depth from defocus and from correspondences, then runs a Markov Random Field propagation algorithm that improves the estimates based on some loss functions defined with the gradients of the image. This provides them with a really sharp depth map. Another paper called confocal stereo also produces really high quality depth maps by changing both the focus and the aperture, which can also be done with a single lightfield.
Do professional cameras contain light field cameras?
@graphicstar11 There was a company called Lytro that made professional-grade (and consumer) lightfield cameras, which got bought by Google. Since then, companies like Google have explored how to incorporate "lightfield-like" features into camera and software designs, in the spirit of computational photography. The founder of Lytro is now a prof at Berkeley, and is hacking on so-called Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) which use machine learning to approximate light fields from images. So, the ideas and technology live on---though I don't know if anyone is building a straightforward lightfield camera these days.