Rotational Crossed-Slit Light Fields

Light fields (LFs) are image-based representation that records the radiance along all rays along every direction through every point in space. Traditionally LFs are acquired by using a 2D grid of evenly spaced pinhole cameras or by translating a pinhole camera along the 2D grid using a robot arm. In this paper, we present a novel LF sampling scheme by exploiting a special non-centric camera called the crossed-slit or XSlit camera. An XSlit camera acquires rays that simultaneously pass through two oblique slits. We show that, instead of translating the camera as in the pinhole case, we can effectively sample the LF by rotating individual or both slits while keeping the camera fixed. This leads a "fixed-location" LF acquisition scheme. We further show through theoretical analysis and experiments that the resulting XSlit LFs provide several advantages: they provide more dense spatial-angular sampling, are amenable multi-view stereo matching and volumetric reconstruction, and can synthesize unique refocusing effects.