Light Fields: Present and Future (Computational Photography)
Se Baek Oh, MIT
Anthony Accardi, MIT
Zhengyun Zhang, Stanford
The ray–based 4D lightfield representation, based on simple 3D geometric principles, has led to a range of new algorithms and applications in Computer Vision and Graphics. They include digital refocusing,
depth estimation, synthetic aperture, and glare reduction within a camera or using an array of cameras.
The lightfield representation is, however, inadequate to describe interactions with diffractive or phase–sensitive optical elements. Fourier optics principles are used to represent wavefronts with additional phase information. This course reviews the current and future directions in exploiting higher dimensional representation of light transport. We hope the course will inspire researchers in computer vision comfortable with ray–based analysis to develop new tools and algorithms based on joint exploration of geometric and wave optics concepts.