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Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

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Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#71

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Now just give me this in full stereoscopic, hi-res, for my cellphone. With video.

Of course (hopefully), that's version 4 or 5. This initial roll-out is looking great! Can't wait to play around with one of the units in the local photo shop.

Looking at the demos, I wonder what the depth-of-field is? Is it entirely calculable, or is it just a few feet and then the user sets the target? It looks like it is tiny, but I'm guessing it's set that way to show off the cool features of the technology.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#72

Post by raleec »

sbierwagen wrote: post #17

The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention: - Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP) - Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1] - Various amusing aliasing problems. (not…

I realize that this type of discourse is the raison d'être of this site, but I think it's pretty funny that I came to this discussion immediately after reading today's xkcd (http://xkcd.com/915/)

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#73

Post by ja27 »

pgbovine wrote: post #10

FYI Ren Ng (the founder of this company) won the 2006 ACM Doctoral Dissertation award for the research that turned into this product: http://awards.acm.org/doctoral_dissertation/

I found a couple of his publications:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/fourierphoto/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfmicroscope/

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#74

Post by ugh »

m3koval wrote: post #28
ugh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you don’t need a second sensor and a second lens?

Stereo vision does need two sensors and two lenses, where a micro-lens approach would only require one of each. However, the micro-lens camera would need a much larger and higher resolution sensor to produce a depth image that has the same resolution of the equivalent stereo camera. Ignoring the size of the sensor, producing two standard camera lenses will always be cheaper than producing an array of multiple (i.e. m…

Sure, but you get it for free with this camera. It wouldn’t make sense to build a second sensor and lens into a light field camera.

This is obviously not the main use case – and we seem to be talking past each other.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#75

Post by ctdonath »

bad_user wrote: post #40
jws wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary toolchain for the dynamic images – you could embed the full dynamic information in a JPEG extension and use the JPEG thumbnail as a thumbnail and the JPEG image as your selected representation. Then you could use your nonstandard code to regenerate the JPEG image data from your full data when you wished. You can just produce a composite image that's sharp all over… – but what fun is that? I'm having a gra…

You can just produce a composite image that's sharp all over… – but what fun is that? With DSLRs that have huge lenses with large aperture sizes, the depth of field varies a lot and those lenses also have a sweetspot in focal-length / aperture for which images produced are the sharpest. Lowering the aperture size increases the depth of field, but then you've got another problem as the shutter speed also has to be adj…

"people don't like playing with their images on the computer."

...until they have a great shot ruined by improper focus. Or worse, an entire afternoon of great shots at a memorable event ruined by the autofocus switch set to "off". Us geeks may notice in time, but most consumers/users won't.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#77

Post by romansanchez »

Props to the innovation, but in terms of reaching the consumer market I doubt the appeal will suffice for widespread reach. Even if it did, a licensing deal would be more appropriate just for the sake of them investing in the innovation which is what they're good at, not distribution.

Re: Revolutionary "Light Field" camera tech - shoot-first, focus-later

#80

Post by jarek »

riklomas wrote: post #62
sbierwagen wrote: post #17

The downsides, which, of course, this press release doesn't mention: - Greatly, greatly reduced image resolution. Great big dedicated-camera sized lens and image sensor, cellphone-camera sized pictures. 1680×1050, at most. (1.76MP) - Color aberration. The microlenses have to be small, of course, so they're going to be made of single physical elements, rather than doublets.[1] - Various amusing aliasing problems. (not…

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

I take it you bought the first gen iPod?
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