MIT News reviewed MIT Graphics Group's article presented last week at IEEE Conference on Computer Vision in Kyoto, Japan. The idea is that given enough time, a digital camera could take a dozen photos with different focus distance and software could stitch them into a perfectly focused composite.
For the time being, however, the technique is limited by the speed of camera sensors. So, the group described alternative approach based on "lattice-focal lens," an ordinary lens filter with what look like 12 tiny boxes of different heights clustered at its center. Each box is in fact a lens with a different focal length, which projects an image onto a different part of the camera's sensor. The raw image would look like gobbledygook, but the same type of algorithm that can combine multiple exposures into a coherent composite can also recover a regular photo from the raw image.
More details and articles can be found on Sam Hasinoff page.
This has already been accomplished years ago with a high speed sensor in Photron's Focuscope. See below:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.photron.com/content.cfm?n=products&id=Focuscope%20fv%2D100c
The same idea, indeed. Probably, the only difference is that MIT plans to apply it to mass market camera, while Photron appears to address only microscopy market.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link!