Light fields and computational photography

Marc Levoy has retired from Stanford University to lead a team at Google. This project is no longer active as a Stanford research project. However, many of the technologies developed during this project live on in products such as Google StreetView (e), the Lytro Camera (j), and Google's Jump camera (o).

Overview

The light field, first described in Arun Gershun's classic 1936 paper of the same name, is defined as radiance as a function of position and direction in regions of space free of occluders. In free space, the light field is a 4D function - scalar or vector depending on the exact definition employed. Light fields were introduced into computer graphics in 1996 by Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan. Their proposed application was image-based-rendering - computing new views of a scene from pre-existing views without the need for scene geometry. (A workshop on image-based modeling and rendering was held at Stanford in 1998.)

Since 1996, research on light fields has followed a number of lines. On the theoretical side, researchers have developed spatial and frequency domain analyses of light field sampling and have proposed several new parameterizations of the light field, including surface light fields and unstructured Lumigraphs. On the practical side, researchers have experimented with literally dozens of ways to capture light fields, ranging from camera arrays to kaleidoscopes, as well as several ways to display them, such as an array of video projectors aimed at a lenticular sheet. Researchers have also explored the relationship between light fields and other sampled representations of light transport, such as incident light fields and reflectance fields. At Stanford, we have focused on the boundary between light fields, photography, and high-performance imaging, an area we sometimes call computational photography. (A workshop on this theme was held at MIT in May of 2005.) However, computational photography has grown to become broader than light fields, and our research also touches on other aspects of light fields, such as interactive animation of light fields and computing shape from light fields.

The images above depict some of the work we have done in our laboratory on light fields:

Recent papers in this area:

Some older papers:

Slides from talks:

(Listed in reverse chronological order. (Slides from papers may also be available on the web pages of those papers.)

Demos:

Available software and data:

Publicity about the project

Financial support:

A list of technical papers, with abstracts and pointers to additional information, is also available. Or you can return to the research projects page or our home page.

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