Light Field - Ways To Create Light Fields

Ways To Create Light Fields

Light fields are a fundamental representation for light. As such, there are as many ways of creating light fields as there are computer programs capable of creating images or instruments capable of capturing them.

In computer graphics, light fields are typically produced either by rendering a 3D model or by photographing a real scene. In either case, to produce a light field views must be obtained for a large collection of viewpoints. Depending on the parameterization employed, this collection will typically span some portion of a line, circle, plane, sphere, or other shape, although unstructured collections of viewpoints are also possible (Buehler 2001).

Devices for capturing light fields photographically may include a moving handheld camera, a robotically controlled camera (Levoy, 2002), an arc of cameras (as in the bullet time effect used in The Matrix), a dense array of cameras (Kanade 1998; Yang 2002; Wilburn 2005), or a handheld camera (Ng 2005; Georgiev 2006), microscope (Levoy 2006), or other optical system in which an array of microlenses has been inserted in the optical path.

How many images should be in a light field? The largest known light field (of Michelangelo's statue of Night) contains 24,000 1.3-megapixel images. At a deeper level, the answer depends on the application. For light field rendering (see the Application section below), if you want to walk completely around an opaque object, then of course you need to photograph its back side. Less obviously, if you want to walk close to the object, and the object lies astride the st plane, then you need images taken at finely spaced positions on the uv plane (in the two-plane parameterization shown above), which is now behind you, and these images need to have high spatial resolution.

The number and arrangement of images in a light field, and the resolution of each image, are together called the "sampling" of the 4D light field. Analyses of light field sampling have been undertaken by many researchers; a good starting point is Chai (2000). Also of interest is Durand (2005) for the effects of occlusion, Ramamoorthi (2006) for the effects of lighting and reflection, and Ng (2005) and Zwicker (2006) for applications to plenoptic cameras and 3D displays, respectively.