Ray Tracing-Guided Design of Plenoptic Cameras

Abstract

The design of a plenoptic camera requires the combination of two dissimilar optical systems, namely a main lens and an array of microlenses. And while the construction process of a conventional camera is mainly concerned with focusing the image onto a single plane, in the case of plenoptic cameras there can be additional requirements such as a predefined depth of field or a desired range of disparities in neighboring microlens images. Due to this complexity, the manual creation of multiple plenoptic camera setups is often a time-consuming task. In this work we assume a simulation framework as well as the main lens data given and present a method to calculate the remaining aperture, sensor and microlens array parameters under different sets of constraints. Our ray tracingbased approach is shown to result in models outperforming their pendants generated with the commonly used paraxial approximations in terms of image quality, while still meeting the desired constraints. Both the implementation and evaluation setup including 30 plenoptic camera designs are made publicly available.

Mind the Exit Pupil Gap: Revisiting the Intrinsics of a Standard Plenoptic Camera

“… Integration of Claff’s lens collection [ 47 ] and a collection of sensor presets. Assisted plenoptic camera (SPC and FPC) configuration based on the ideas of [ 48 ]. …”

Design and implementation of plenoptic imaging system with reduced aberrations

“…However, designing a system with optimized aberrations, especially for off-axial micro-lenses, is challenging. The ray-tracing guided design 5 improves the off-axial aberrations of the traditional method from paraxial approximations 6 . However, the diffraction effects of high-resolution plenoptic imaging systems are unignorable for relatively smaller diameters of the micro lenses.…”