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Post by Cctv on Dec 7, 2005 14:06:55 GMT -5
www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/2005/pr-camera-110205.html Computer scientists create 'light field camera' banishing fuzzy photos
The light field camera, sometimes referred to as a "plenoptic camera," looks and operates exactly like an ordinary handheld digital camera. The difference lies inside. In a conventional camera, rays of light are corralled through the camera's main lens and converge on the film or digital photosensor directly behind it. Each point on the resulting two-dimensional photo is the sum of all the light rays striking that location.
The light field camera adds an additional element—a microlens array—inserted between the main lens and the photosensor. Resembling the multi-faceted compound eye of an insect, the microlens array is a square panel composed of nearly 90,000 miniature lenses. Each lenslet separates back out the converged light rays received from the main lens before they hit the photosensor and changes the way the light information is digitally recorded. Custom processing software manipulates this "expanded light field" and traces where each ray would have landed if the camera had been focused at many different depths. The final output is a synthetic image in which the subjects have been digitally refocused.
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