Spatial analysis of discrete plenoptic sampling

Plenoptic cameras are intended to fully capture the light rays in a scene. Using this information, optical elements can be applied to a scene computationally rather than physically—allowing an infinite variety of pictures to be rendered after the fact from the same plenoptic data. Practical plenoptic cameras necessarily capture discrete samples of the plenoptic function, which together with the overall camera design, can constrain the variety and quality of rendered images. In this paper we specifically analyze the nature of the discrete data that plenoptic cameras capture, in a manner that unifies the traditional and focused plenoptic camera designs. We further present a resolution analysis for plenoptic cameras and develop design guidelines for maximizing resolution. A generalized rendering algorithm is presented that minimizes artifacts resulting from the lower resolution angular sampling that accompanies high-resolution spatial sampling. Experimental results using a real-time GPU implementation of our algorithms demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.