DIY Camera Array 1: Computational Photography Primer.

Step 2 Wrapping up the primer... be sure to read Part 2.

This camera array, with its twelve cameras, captures only a very coarse representation of the light field. It is far from the state of the art. However, many of the most sophisticated light field cameras are confined to the laboratory, or cost from $5-10,000. This camera array (from here on, called the Large Light Field Camera Array or LLFC) can be built for a few hundred dollars with old used cameras, and is happy to go outside and take pictures.


The refocusing technique demonstrated here is called Synthetic Aperture Refocusing. Ted Adelson at MIT wrote an early influential paper on it, and it was also investigated in depth by many people at many labs, including MIT (Frédo Durand, Ramesh Raskar, Ren Ng) and Stanford (Mark Levoy). Todor Georgiev at Adobe has developed and documented some very sophisticated camera systems and written up lots of tutorial material. Synthetic aperture refocusing is now pretty well understood. Our camera array may be the first to exploit cheap, high resolution cameras that don't need a computer connected, and our refocusing software LFtextures may be the first open-source, cross-platform application available. Our goal is to make these technologies accessible and understandable, and to encourage experimentation by people of all stripes.



This tutorial is just the beginning. We (Daniel Reetz and Matti Kariluoma) will present a series of tutorials on how to build an array, how to operate it, and how to make synthetically refocused images from the output of the array. These updates will come about 1 per week for the next six or seven weeks. While this deviates a bit from the normal Instructables format, we felt it would be a better approach than a hundred-step Instructable, as I did with my previous "DIY Book Scanner" project. PS. If you're interested in book scanning, drop by the DIYBookScanner forums.