True zoomed Light Field panorama

Abstract

Light Field, a computational photography technique has various exciting features like refocusing and novel view synthesis. Previous works in light field photography have focused their work on creating light field images having a limited field of view. This limitation of light field images motivates the research for a acquisition system which can capture light field images with larger field of view. Recent works have been done to acquire light fields using a cylindrical arrangement of cameras which resolve the conventional complexity issue of acquisition of light field and subsequently merging them by essentially combining the capture and merging processes into a single exercise. We use this cylindrical system to generate a novel True Zoomed Light field panorama from the captured light field, which gives a wide 360? field of view similar to traditional panoramas along with the zoom applied to the whole panorama. The captured panorama can also be manipulated in various ways as is possible with other light field recordings. Also various zooming options which can be easily found in traditional camera, either tends to change the relative shape of the objects in image or introduces pix-elation effect. We use true zoom so as to improvise the zooming effect. We generate novel “True Zoomed Light Field Panorama” using our system. This type of panorama gives user a feeling of being closer to or farther from the whole environment at the same time.