LFC : Light Field Camera – Take your snaps.. Focus later..

You may have face a number of situations where the images you captured gets blurred. Or sometimes you may miss to click some valuable moments due to delay in focusing. Imagine a camera that doesn’t need to focus before taking a snap. Just take some clicks at random. Don’t bother whether it blurred or not.

Light Field Camera, or called plenoptic camera, consists of a million of microlens to capture 4D light field information from all the distances, obtaining a live picture of the environment.

Light Field Camera (LFC) is not working as your current camera does. It captures information of all the light rays coming from the object. This information is processed later and  can be tuned to a picture or, more specific to a point or multiple points.

The arrangement of lens and sensors in LFC are in such a way that the incoming light scatter at microlens panel and this is captured by sensor. The amount of scattering depends upon the angle from which light approached. Since the angle can be obtained from the captured information, we can calculate where the light would have ended up. This allows us to refocus the image even after taking the click. The additional information obtained about the object comes at the expense of image resolution. The overview of processing the recorded light field is shown below.

LFC is now available to consumers by Lytro. You can refocus photos clicked with LFC from the picture picture gallery of Lytro.