light field camera
A light- field camera, also called a plenoptic camera, differs from a digital camera in that you can subsequently change the sharpness of the captured images. It is possible to adjust the plane of focus to specific objects, thus rendering certain image planes sharp and others blurred. The changes in sharpness can be made immediately using computational photography or subsequently using bidl processing programs on the personal computer.
In a normal digital camera, the brightness and color values accumulate in the pixels of the image sensor. In contrast, the image sensor of the light field camera not only records the brightness and color values, but also the many angles of incidence of the light beams. For this purpose, the light field camera has a special optical system consisting of many microlenses, each of which refracts the various light beams in a cone shape and projects them onto the image sensor in a circle. A light beam incident perpendicularly activates the pixel on the image sensor that lies at the same angle, while a light beam incident at an angle activates a pixel at the edge of the circle. The sharpness adjustment itself is then performed with special software on the personal computer. For the display with sharpness shift, a corresponding Flash Player is required.
The first light field camera based on the light field was developed by the company Lytro, California. Since the principle of recording differs from the classic digital cameras, the characteristic value resolution is not applicable. In this context, Lytro speaks of captured light rays and mentions the figure of eleven million.
The light field camera itself consists of a zoom lens, the image sensor, a powerful processor, the light field engine, and a small touch screen for object selection and zooming.