Ray Tracing-Guided Design of Plenoptic Cameras

TL;DR

This paper introduces a ray tracing-guided method for designing plenoptic cameras, optimizing aperture, sensor, and microlens parameters to improve image quality under specific constraints, surpassing traditional paraxial approximation methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel ray tracing-based approach for designing plenoptic cameras, enabling more accurate and constraint-compliant models compared to conventional methods.

Findings

Models outperform paraxial approximation designs in image quality.

The method successfully meets predefined depth and disparity constraints.

30 camera designs were evaluated and made publicly available.

Abstract

The design of a plenoptic camera requires the combination of two dissimilar optical systems, namely a main lens and an array of microlenses. And while the construction process of a conventional camera is mainly concerned with focusing the image onto a single plane, in the case of plenoptic cameras there can be additional requirements such as a predefined depth of field or a desired range of disparities in neighboring microlens images. Due to this complexity, the manual creation of multiple plenoptic camera setups is often a time-consuming task. In this work we assume a simulation framework as well as the main lens data given and present a method to calculate the remaining aperture, sensor and microlens array parameters under different sets of constraints. Our ray tracing-based approach is shown to result in models outperforming their pendants generated with the commonly used paraxial approximations in terms of image quality, while still meeting the desired constraints. Both the implementation and evaluation setup including 30 plenoptic camera designs are made publicly available.