Light Field Sampling : Image, Video & Multimedia Processing

Light field is one of the most representative image-based rendering techniques that generate novel virtual views from images instead of 3D models. The light field capture and rendering process can be considered as a procedure of sampling the light rays in the space and interpolating those in novel views. As a result, light field can be studied as a high-dimensional signal sampling problem, which has attracted a lot of research interest and become a convergence point between computer graphics and signal processing, and even computer vision.

This lecture focuses on answering two questions regarding light field sampling, namely how many images are needed for a light field, and if such number is limited, where we should capture them. The book can be divided into three parts.

First, we give a complete analysis on uniform sampling of IBR data.
Next, we describe a very general sampling framework named freeform sampling.
Third, we present a self-reconfigurable camera array that we developed, which features a very efficient algorithm for real-time rendering and the ability of automatically reconfiguring the cameras to improve the rendering quality.