High-resolution lightfield photography using two masks

A major theme of computational photography is the acquisition of lightfield, which opens up new imaging capabilities, such as focusing after image capture. However, to capture the lightfield, one normally has to sacrifice significant spatial resolution as compared to normal imaging for a fixed sensor size. In this work, we present a new design for lightfield acquisition, which allows for the capture of a higher resolution lightfield by using two attenuation masks. They are positioned at the aperture stop and the optical path respectively, so that the four-dimensional (4D) lightfield spectrum is encoded and sampled by a two-dimensional (2D) camera sensor in a single snapshot. Then, during post-processing, by exploiting the coherence embedded in a lightfield, we can retrieve the desired 4D lightfield with a higher resolution using inverse imaging. The performance of our proposed method is demonstrated with simulations based on actual lightfield datasets. (c) 2012 Optical Society of America