Fourier analysis of the focused plenoptic camera
Andrew Lumsdaine, Lili Lin, Jeremiah James Willcock, Yuduo Zhou · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2013
The focused plenoptic camera is a recently developed approach to lightfield capture that uses the microlens array as an imaging system focused on the focal plane of the main camera lens. Since lightfields can be captured with significantly higher spatial resolution than with the traditional approach, images can be rendered at resolutions that meet the expectations of modern photographers. The focused plenoptic camera captures lightfields with a different tradeoff between spatial and angular information than with the traditional approach. To more rigorously characterize these tradeoffs, including the limits of this new approach, this paper presents a Fourier analysis of the focused plenoptic camera. Based on this analysis, we also present an extended Fourier-slice rendering algorithm that can be used to render high-resolution images from lightfields.