Simulation of Plenoptic Cameras

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible Blender-based simulation model for plenoptic cameras that generates ground truth data, mimics real camera effects, and facilitates cost-effective research and application testing.

Contribution

A novel, easy-to-use Blender model for simulating various plenoptic camera types, providing ground truth data and realistic image degradation effects.

Findings

Simulation results match real camera image degradation

Model enables inexpensive assessment of plenoptic camera applications

Publicly available for research and development

Abstract

Plenoptic cameras enable the capturing of spatial as well as angular color information which can be used for various applications among which are image refocusing and depth calculations. However, these cameras are expensive and research in this area currently lacks data for ground truth comparisons. In this work we describe a flexible, easy-to-use Blender model for the different plenoptic camera types which is on the one hand able to provide the ground truth data for research and on the other hand allows an inexpensive assessment of the cameras usefulness for the desired applications. Furthermore we show that the rendering results exhibit the same image degradation effects as real cameras and make our simulation publicly available.