Space varying cylindrical system for Light field panorama

Previous works in light field photography have focused on creating light field images with a limited field of view. Merging of light field images to increase the field of view results in undesirable artifacts such as change of focal plane depth. There is also considerable inherent complexity involved with capturing and merging light fields. This motivates the search for a wide FOV light field capture system. Here we present an approach to acquire light fields using a cylindrical arrangement of cameras which resolve the conventional complexity issue of acquisition of light field and subsequently merging them by essentially combining the capture and merging processes into a single exercise. We then use our system to generate a novel Light field panorama from the captured light field, which gives a wide 360° field of view similar to traditional panoramas. Moreover the panorama can also be manipulated in various ways as is possible with other light field recordings. In particular, we demonstrate the computation of a panorama with a space varying refocus capability.