September 2018
Spotlight Summary by Roarke Horstmeyer
Field of view in monocentric multiscale cameras
Long before the age of the cell phone selfie, most images were recorded on film. And during these simpler times, the goal of the camera lens was straightforward—the lens had to form as perfect an image as possible onto the film, since it was difficult to modify it after the fact. Now, when nearly every camera uses a digital sensor, the goal of lens design is a bit less focused (no pun intended). By forming imperfect images and then digitally altering them post-capture, a whole suite of new camera designs is now emerging to offer some amazing functionalities. In this work, Pang and Brady introduce several novel designs for monocentric multiscale (MMS) cameras. The MMS architecture is comprised of a primary collection lens with a large number of smaller cameras behind it to form individual, slightly overlapping images of a particular scene. Afterwards, these digital images can be stitched together to form an extremely wide field-of-view result with very high resolution. Here, the MMS architecture is extended into some interesting directions—to image a ring-shaped area, to individually focus at different distances, and to capture full panoramas containing over 5 gigapixels worth of image data. In combination with new augmented reality/virtual reality viewing platforms, it will be interesting to see how people interact with such non-uniform 3D image data, perhaps taking us past the era of the standard selfie photo and hopefully onto something even more exciting.
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Article Information
Field of view in monocentric multiscale cameras
Wubin Pang and David J. Brady
Appl. Opt. 57(24) 6999-7005 (2018) View: HTML | PDF