(2007-04-13) Computational Photography

Computational Photography looks like a cool Side Effect of Digital Camera work. Computational photography, however, transforms the act of capturing the image. Some researchers use curved mirrors to distort their camera's field of view. Others replace the camera lens with an array of thousands of microlenses or with a virtual lens that exists only in software. Some use what they call smart flashes to illuminate a scene with complex patterns of light, or set up domes containing hundreds of flashes to light a subject from many angles. The list goes on: three-dimensional apertures, multiple exposures, cameras stacked in arrays, and more. In the hands of professional photographers and filmmakers, the creative potential of these technologies is tremendous. "I expect it to lead to new art forms," says Marc Levoy, a professor of computer science at Stanford University... For consumers, some of these new technologies could improve family snapshots. Imagine fixing the focus of a blurry shot after the fact, or creating group shots of your friends and family in which no one is blinking or making a silly face. Or posing your children in front of a sunset and seeing details of their faces instead of just silhouettes... Want that family photo in 3-D? Nayar's group takes three-dimensional pictures with a normal camera by placing a cone-shaped mirror, like a cheerleader's megaphone, in front of the lens. Because some of the light from an object comes directly into the lens and the rest of the light first bounces off spots inside the cone, the camera captures images from multiple vantage points. From those data, computer software constructs a full 3-D model, as Nayar's group explained at the SIGGRAPH meeting last year in Boston.