A Gigapixel Computational Light-Field Camera

TL;DR

This paper introduces a computational light-field camera capable of gigapixel resolution, enabling detailed 3D reconstructions, refocusing, and super-resolution beyond traditional hardware limits.

Contribution

It presents a novel computational approach to light-field imaging that achieves gigapixel resolution without requiring an extremely large sensor.

Findings

Achieved 1 gigapixel light-field acquisition with diffraction-limited quality.

Enables large depth of field and high-resolution 3D reconstructions.

Potential for terapixel reconstructions with optimized acquisition time.

Abstract

Light-field cameras allow the acquisition of both the spatial and angular components of the light. This has a wide range of applications from image refocusing to 3D reconstruction of a scene. The conventional way to perform such acquisitions leads to a strong spatio-angular resolution limit. Here we propose a computational version of the light-field camera. We perform a one gigapixel photo-realistic diffraction limited light-field acquisition, that would require the use of a one gigapixel sensor were the acquisition to be performed with a conventional light-field camera. This result is mostly limited by the total acquisition time, as our system could in principle allow $\sim$Terapixel reconstructions to be achieved. The reported result presents many potential advantages, such as the possibility to perform large depth of field light-field acquisitions, realistic refocusing along a very wide range of depths, very high dimensional super-resolved image acquisitions, and large depth of field 3D reconstructions.