Simulation of Plenoptic Cameras
This work addresses a data gap for researchers in computational photography, though it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation tools.
The authors tackled the lack of ground truth data and high cost of plenoptic cameras by developing a flexible Blender simulation model that provides accurate data and allows inexpensive assessment, showing it replicates real camera degradation effects and making it publicly available.
Plenoptic cameras enable the capturing of spatial as well as angular color information which can be used for various applications among which are image refocusing and depth calculations. However, these cameras are expensive and research in this area currently lacks data for ground truth comparisons. In this work we describe a flexible, easy-to-use Blender model for the different plenoptic camera types which is on the one hand able to provide the ground truth data for research and on the other hand allows an inexpensive assessment of the cameras usefulness for the desired applications. Furthermore we show that the rendering results exhibit the same image degradation effects as real cameras and make our simulation publicly available.