Tensor photography : exploring space of 4D modulations inside traditional camera designs

Abstract

Light field photography has gained a significant research in the last two decades: today, commercial light field cameras are widely available demonstrating capabilities such as post-capture refocus, 3D photography and view point changes. But, most traditional acquisition approaches either multiplex a low resolution light field into a single sensor image or require multiple photographs to be taken for acquiring high resolution light field. In this thesis, we design, implement and analyze a new light field camera architecture that allows capture and reconstruction of higher resolution light fields in a single shot. The proposed architecture comprises three key components: light field atoms as sparse representation of natural light fields, an optical design to allow capture of optimized 2D light field projections and robust sparse reconstruction methods to recover a 4D light field from a single coded 2D projection. In addition we also explore other applications including compressive focal stack reconstructions, light field compression and denoising.