Focused Plenoptic Camera and Rendering Focused Plenoptic Camera and Rendering

Plenoptic cameras, constructed with internal microlens arrays, capture both spatial and angular information, i.e., the full four-dimensional radiance, of a scene. The design of traditional plenoptic cameras assumes that each microlens image is completely defocused with respect to the image created by the main camera lens. As a result, only a single pixel in the final image is rendered from each microlens image, resulting in disappointingly low resolution. A recently developed alternative approach based on the focused plenoptic camera uses the microlens array as an imaging system focused on the image plane of the main camera lens. The flexible spatio-angular tradeoff that becomes available with this design enables rendering of final images with significantly higher resolution than those from traditional plenoptic cameras. In this paper we analyze the focused plenoptic camera in optical phase space and present a series of rendering algorithms for producing high-quality high-resolution images. We also present our GPU-based implementations of these algorithms, which are able to render full screen refocused images in real time.