Rich image capture with plenoptic cameras

The plenoptic function was originally defined as a record of both the 3D structure of the lightfield and of its dependence on parameters such as wavelength, polarization, etc. Still, most work on these ideas has emphasized the 3D aspect of lightfield capture and manipulation, with less attention paid to other parameters. In this paper, we leverage the high resolution and flexible sampling trade-offs of the focused plenoptic camera to perform high-resolution capture of the rich “non 3D” structure of the plenoptic function. Two different techniques are presented and analyzed, using extended dynamic range photography as a particular example. The first technique simultaneously captures multiple exposures with a microlens array that has an interleaved set of different filters. The second technique places multiple filters at the main lens aperture. Experimental results validate our approach, producing 1.3Mpixel HDR images with a single capture.