Focal Stack Photography: High-Performance Photography with a Conventional Camera

We look at how a seemingly small change in the photographic process—capturing a focal stack at the press of a button, instead of a single photo—can boost significantly the optical performance of a conventional camera. By generalizing the familiar photographic concepts of “depth of field” and “exposure time” to the case of focal stacks, we show that focal stack photography has two performance advantages: (1) it allows us to capture a given depth of field much faster than one-shot photography, and (2) it leads to higher signal-to-noise ratios when capturing wide depths of field with a restricted exposure time. We consider these advantages in detail and discuss their implications for photography.