adobe light field camera

[tomhale]

Anybody think you can use adobe's light field camera lens with the RED. I'm not sure how the post production work flow would work with this lens but it seems like if you had control over the focus in post it would give you a tremendous amount of control.

http://images.google.com/imgres?img.../images?q=adobe+light+field+camera&um=1&hl=en

 

[Mark Phelan]

Fascinating.

 

[Tim Sutherland]

Thats incredible. Must be a special plugin for raw processing to do that in post, right?

 

[tomhale]

I would think you would lose resolution because it seems like the lens focuses the image onto 19 different parts of the chip and so any one image from the camera would be 1/19 the resolution. Not sure though.

 

[Julio Quintana]

I would think you would lose resolution because it seems like the lens focuses the image onto 19 different parts of the chip and so any one image from the camera would be 1/19 the resolution. Not sure though.

Looks like it would be ideal for the new generation of 39 megapixel still cameras.

 

[J. Eric Camp]

the name "light field camera" says it all. The lens is just a component of:

The Adobe Light-Field Camera is a prototype 100-megapixel camera that takes a three-dimensional photo of the scene in focus using 19 uniquely configured lenses. Each lens will take a 5.2 megapixel photo of the entire scene around the camera and each image can be focused later in any way.

It is still a prototype and has some work to be done.

Look here:

http://www.tgeorgiev.net/IntegralView.pdf

GREAT idea.... a long time till we can do anything with it.

 

[tomhale]

Do you think this lens could be used as a simplistic matting tool to say delete everything outside a certain depth of field and keep only what is in focus?

 

[J. Eric Camp]

Nope, doesn't work like that. This thing takes 19 still images. It just takes 19 at once. Each one of those images when analyzed independently is just a regular still image. When comp'ed together you now have some limited paraxial control and multiple steps of DOF to arrange to your liking.

Physics makes your idea nigh impossible.

 

[DSPographer]

Do you think this lens could be used as a simplistic matting tool to say delete everything outside a certain depth of field and keep only what is in focus?

The processing can generate a distance estimate for each piece of detail in the image. Unfortunately where there is no detail the distance becomes ambiguous which could cause problems in implementing your idea.

 

[DSPographer]

I would think you would lose resolution because it seems like the lens focuses the image onto 19 different parts of the chip and so any one image from the camera would be 1/19 the resolution. Not sure though.

Some of the lost resolution is restored when the images are combined. Theoretically you can't do as well when focusing between sub-images from small sub-lenses after detection as you could with a large image from one large lens. This is because the phase of the light is not measured by the detector but the phase does determine what gets focused by the lens.