A stereoscopic camera employing a single main lens

A camera for extracting depth information from a scene is described. It incorporates a single main lens along with a lenticular array placed at the sensor plane. The resulting plenoptic camera provides information about how the scene would look when viewed from a continuum of possible viewpoints bounded by the main lens aperture. Deriving depth information is simpler than in a binocular stereo system because the correspondence problem is minimized. The camera extracts information about both horizontal and vertical parallax, which improves the reliability of the depth estimates