A high-resolution lightfield camera with dual-mask design

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new design for lightfield acquisition. In comparison with the conventional lightfield acquisition techniques, the key characteristic of our system is its ability to achieve a higher resolution lightfield given a fixed sensor. In particular, the system architecture employs two attenuation masks respectively positioned at the aperture stop and the optical path of the camera, so that the four-dimensional (4D) lightfield spectrum is encoded and sampled by a two-dimensional (2D) camera sensor in a single snapshot. In post-processing, by exploiting the coherence embedded in a lightfield, we are able to retrieve the desired 4D lightfield of a higher resolution using inverse imaging. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed method with simulations based on the actual lightfield dataset. © 2012 SPIE.