I believe the lytro camera was a plenoptic, or light field, camera. Light field cameras capture information about the intensity together with the direction of light emanating from a scene. Conventional cameras record only light intensity at various wavelengths.
While conventional cameras capture a single high-resolution focal plane and light field cameras sacrifice resolution to "re-focus" via software after the fact, the CMU Split-Lohmann camera provides a middle ground, using an adaptive computational lens to physically focus every part of the image independently. This allows it to capture a "deep-focus" image where objects at multiple distances are sharp simultaneously, maintaining the high resolution of a conventional camera while achieving the depth flexibility of a light field camera without the blur or data loss.
Something I find interesting is that while holograms and the CMU camera both manipulate the "phase" of light, they do so for opposite reasons: a hologram records phase to recreate a 3D volume, whereas the CMU camera modulates phase to fix a 2D image.
Isn't this the lytro camera?
I believe the lytro camera was a plenoptic, or light field, camera. Light field cameras capture information about the intensity together with the direction of light emanating from a scene. Conventional cameras record only light intensity at various wavelengths.
While conventional cameras capture a single high-resolution focal plane and light field cameras sacrifice resolution to "re-focus" via software after the fact, the CMU Split-Lohmann camera provides a middle ground, using an adaptive computational lens to physically focus every part of the image independently. This allows it to capture a "deep-focus" image where objects at multiple distances are sharp simultaneously, maintaining the high resolution of a conventional camera while achieving the depth flexibility of a light field camera without the blur or data loss.
Something I find interesting is that while holograms and the CMU camera both manipulate the "phase" of light, they do so for opposite reasons: a hologram records phase to recreate a 3D volume, whereas the CMU camera modulates phase to fix a 2D image.
Light field cameras are mentioned under "related work":
https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/svaf/static/pdfs/Spatially_Varyin...
The article mentions a spatial light modulator, which I believe the Lytro camera did not have.
The image(s) were also trash unfortunately and a PITA to process. Barely usable even in ideal circumstances.
Paper has some more useful examples:
https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/svaf/static/pdfs/Spatially_Varyin...
It's not even loading for me (probably because it's a huge file).
I wonder if this camera might somehow record depth information, or be modified to do such a thing.
That would make it really useful, maybe replacing carmera+lidar.