Hybrid-sensor high-resolution light field imaging

Abstract

Light field imaging is an emerging research field due to the new capabilities it brings, including post-capture refocusing, aperture control, and 3D modeling. Single-shot single-sensor light field cameras try to balance the fundamental trade-off between spatial and angular resolution. The spatial resolution achieved with such cameras is typically far from being satisfactory, limiting the extensive adoption of light field cameras. In this paper, we present a hybrid-sensor light field camera that uses minimal optical components, a regular sensor and a micro-lens array based light field sensor to produce high-spatial-resolution light field. The use of a single lens and matching image planes prevent complexities, such as occlusions, that multi-lens systems suffer from. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed hybrid-sensor camera leads to improved depth estimation in addition to increase in spatial resolution.