Coded Aperture and Optical Heterodyning: A mask-based approach for Digital Refocusing and Light-Field Acquisition by Conventional Cameras

We describe a theoretical framework for reversibly modulating 4D light fields with patterned masks in the optical path of a lens based camera. Based on this framework, we present a novel design to reconstruct the 4D light field from a 2D camera image without any additional lenses as required by previous light field cameras. The patterned mask attenuates light rays inside the camera instead of bending them, and the attenuation recoverably encodes the ray on the 2D sensor. Our mask-equipped camera focuses just as a traditional camera might to capture conventional 2D photos at full sensor resolution, but the raw pixel values also hold a modulated 4D light field. The light field can be recovered by rearranging the tiles of the 2D Fourier transform of sensor values into 4D planes, and computing the inverse Fourier transform. In addition, one can also recover the full resolution image information for the in-focus parts of the scene. We also show how a broad-band mask placed at the lens enables us to compute refocusing at full sensor resolution for images of layered Lambertian scenes. This partial encoding of 4D ray-space data enables editing of image contents by depth to remove or suppress unwanted occluders, yet does not require computational recovery of the complete 4D light field.