Project

Theory unifying ray and wavefront lightfield propagation

Copyright

Camera Culture

Camera Culture

Groups

This work focuses on bringing powerful concepts from wave optics to the creation of new algorithms and applications for computer vision and graphics. Specifically, ray-based, 4D lightfield representation, based on simple 3D geometric principles, has led to a range of new applications that include digital refocusing, depth estimation, synthetic aperture, and glare reduction within a camera or using an array of cameras. The lightfield representation, however, is inadequate to describe interactions with diffractive or phase-sensitive optical elements. Therefore we use Fourier optics principles to represent wavefronts with additional phase information. We introduce a key modification to the ray-based model to support modeling of wave phenomena. The two key ideas are "negative radiance" and a "virtual light projector." This involves exploiting higher dimensional representation of light transport.