A revolution in digital photography on the horizon?

The work of Ren Ng on digital light field photography is coming to fruition and has the potential to revolutionize picture-taking. Lytro Inc., the company founded by Ng, recently announced that it will offer a consumer-level digital light field camera by the end of this year. A light field camera allows digital images to be captured now and focused later. When the pictures are shared, the viewer can choose which part of the image is in focus: the foreground, the background, or something in between. It will allow people to capture a moment and dynamically relive it and share it in different ways, as determined by the eye of the beholder of the photograph instead of just the eye of the photographer. The images are described as “living pictures” that can be altered in real time with the click of a mouse. You can try it for yourself by viewingLytro’s picture gallery. In addition, pictures can converted for viewing in 3D. Dig out your red and blue 3D glasses and take a look at the demo on Lytro’s blog site.

These capabilities are made possible by using software and computing power to alter the image after it is acquired. In addition to making the novel features of the Lytro camera possible, digital post-processing can also be used to remove aberrations and improve image quality. Ng discusses digital correction of lens aberrations in light field photography is his Ph.D. thesis.

For more “standard” imaging methods, post processing for distortion correction is very important for some applications. In aerial photography, for example, obtaining an accurate representation of what is on the ground can be critical. ASE Optics has patented a methodology and optical system as well as an aerial camera that can characterize errors in an image or portion of an image and correct for them. A set of fiducials is projected onto the focal plane array as an image is being acquired. The difference between the ideal and actual fiducial locations is used to characterize the main optical system. Distortion coefficients are computed to back out aberrations. Since the fiducials are created along with every image, the effects of dynamic changes that cause errors during image acquisition can also be removed. The result is improved image quality and more precise geolocation information.

It will be interesting to see what the future has in store for photography as ever-increasing computing power leads to more and more post-processing capabilities.

Are you shifting to post-processing in any applications? If ASE's computational imaging capabilities can help, consider our discovery service.