Ray Tracing-Guided Design of Plenoptic Cameras
This work addresses the time-consuming manual design process for plenoptic cameras, offering a simulation-based solution that is incremental but improves accuracy for researchers and engineers in computational photography.
The paper tackles the complex design of plenoptic cameras by presenting a ray tracing-based method to calculate optical parameters under constraints, resulting in models that outperform those using paraxial approximations in image quality.
The design of a plenoptic camera requires the combination of two dissimilar optical systems, namely a main lens and an array of microlenses. And while the construction process of a conventional camera is mainly concerned with focusing the image onto a single plane, in the case of plenoptic cameras there can be additional requirements such as a predefined depth of field or a desired range of disparities in neighboring microlens images. Due to this complexity, the manual creation of multiple plenoptic camera setups is often a time-consuming task. In this work we assume a simulation framework as well as the main lens data given and present a method to calculate the remaining aperture, sensor and microlens array parameters under different sets of constraints. Our ray tracing-based approach is shown to result in models outperforming their pendants generated with the commonly used paraxial approximations in terms of image quality, while still meeting the desired constraints. Both the implementation and evaluation setup including 30 plenoptic camera designs are made publicly available.