Light field

About: Light field is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5357 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87424 citations.

Light field superresolution

Abstract: Light field cameras have been recently shown to be very effective in applications such as digital refocusing and 3D reconstruction. In a single snapshot these cameras provide a sample of the light field of a scene by trading off spatial resolution with angular resolution. Current methods produce images at a resolution that is much lower than that of traditional imaging devices. However, by explicitly modeling the image formation process and incorporating priors such as Lambertianity and texture statistics, these types of images can be reconstructed at a higher resolution. We formulate this method in a variational Bayesian framework and perform the reconstruction of both the surface of the scene and the (superresolved) light field. The method is demonstrated on both synthetic and real images captured with our light-field camera prototype.

Three-dimensional orientation measurements of symmetric single chromophores using polarization microscopy

Abstract: A complete understanding of any complex molecular system generally requires a knowledge of the three-dimensional (3D) orientation of its components relative both to each other, and to directional perturbations such as interfaces and electromagnetic fields. Far-field polarization microscopy is a convenient and widespread technique for detecting and measuring the orientation of single chromophores. But because the polarized electromagnetic field that is used to probe the system lacks a significant longitudinal component, it was thought that, in general, only 2D orientation information could be obtained1,2,3. Here we demonstrate that far-field polarization microscopy can yield the 3D orientation of certain highly symmetric single chromophores (CdSe nanocrystal quantum dots in the present case). The key requirement is that the chromophores must have a degenerate transition dipole oriented isotropically in two dimensions, which gives rise to a perpendicular ‘dark axis’ that does not couple to the light field. By measuring the fluorescence intensity from the dipole as a function of polarization angle, it is possible to calculate both the tilt angle between the dark axis and the sample plane, as well as the in-plane orientation, and hence obtain the 3D orientation of the chromophore

Light field mapping: efficient representation and hardware rendering of surface light fields

Abstract: A light field parameterized on the surface offers a natural and intuitive description of the view-dependent appearance of scenes with complex reflectance properties. To enable the use of surface light fields in real-time rendering we develop a compact representation suitable for an accelerated graphics pipeline. We propose to approximate the light field data by partitioning it over elementary surface primitives and factorizing each part into a small set of lower-dimensional functions. We show that our representation can be further compressed using standard image compression techniques leading to extremely compact data sets that are up to four orders of magnitude smaller than the input data. Finally, we develop an image-based rendering method, light field mapping, that can visualize surface light fields directly from this compact representation at interactive frame rates on a personal computer. We also implement a new method of approximating the light field data that produces positive only factors allowing for faster rendering using simpler graphics hardware than earlier methods. We demonstrate the results for a variety of non-trivial synthetic scenes and physical objects scanned through 3D photography.

Slow and Fast Light

Abstract: Recent research has established that it is possible to exercise extraordinary control of the velocity of propagation of light pulses through a material system. Both extremely slow propagation (much slower than the velocity of light in vacuum) and fast propagation (exceeding the velocity of light in vacuum) have been observed. This article summarizes this recent research, placing special emphasis on the description of the underlying physical processes leading to the modification of the velocity of light. To understand these new results, it is crucial to recall the distinction between the phase velocity and the group velocity of a light field. These concepts will be defined more precisely below; for the present we note that the group velocity gives the velocity with which a pulse of light propagates through a material system. One thus speaks of “fast” or “slow” light depending on the value of the group velocity vg in comparison to the velocity of light c in vacuum.