A low-cost test bed for light field capture experiments

Current light-field capture devices are complex, usually require modifying the internals of a conventional camera, and discourage new experimentation in a topic area full of new research questions. We adapt a novel 'home-made' camera devised by Wang and Heidrich [2004] for use in a variety of light-field experiments. Unlike commercially available cameras, the camera provides a large effective sensor size, large distance between the lens and the sensor, much larger effective pixel size, extremely high resolution (490 million pixels), low cost (around $500US), and a nominal capture speed of a few seconds. This easily-modified design encourages novices to experiment with light fields. We demonstrate how to implement the microlens based light-field camera of Ng et al. [2005], and the mask based light field camera of Veeraraghavan et al. [2007].