Mirrored Light Field Video Camera Adapter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cost-effective, mirror-based light field camera adapter that captures video-rate light fields, facilitating accessible 3D scene capture for robotic vision applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel, simple, and affordable mirror-based design for light field cameras, including detailed construction, calibration, and decoding methods, with an open-source release.

Findings

Design enables virtual camera arrays with overlapping views

Captures video-rate light fields with simple construction

Prepared for open-source community use

Abstract

This paper proposes the design of a custom mirror-based light field camera adapter that is cheap, simple in construction, and accessible. Mirrors of different shape and orientation reflect the scene into an upwards-facing camera to create an array of virtual cameras with overlapping field of view at specified depths, and deliver video frame rate light fields. We describe the design, construction, decoding and calibration processes of our mirror-based light field camera adapter in preparation for an open-source release to benefit the robotic vision community.