Full Resolution Lightfield Rendering

Lightfield photography enables many new possibilities for digital imaging because it captures both spatial and angular information, i.e., the full four-dimensional radiance, of a scene. Extremely high resolution is required in order to capture four-dimensional data with a two-dimensional sensor. However, images rendered from the lightfield as projections of the four-dimensional radiance onto two spatial dimensions are at significantly lower resolutions. To meet the resolution and image size expectations of modern digital photography, this paper presents a new technique for rendering high resolution images from the lightfield. We call our approach full resolution because it makes full use of both positional and angular information available in captured radiance data. We present a description of our approach and an analysis of the limits and tradeoffs involved. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method experimentally by rendering images from a 542 megapixel lightfield, using the traditional approach and using our new approach. In our experiments, the traditional rendering methods produce a 0.146 megapixel image, while with the full resolution approach we are able to produce a 106 megapixel final image. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computing Methodologies]: Image Processing and Computer Vision—Digitization and Image Capture