Cambridge, Mass. – August 5, 2013 – Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a way for photographers and microscopists to create a 3D image through a single lens, without moving the camera.
Published in the journal Optics Letters, this improbable-sounding technology relies only on computation and mathematics—no unusual hardware or fancy lenses. The effect is the equivalent of seeing a stereo image with one eye closed.
That’s easier said than done, as principal investigator Kenneth B. Crozier, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, explains.
“If you close one eye, depth perception becomes difficult. Your eye can focus on one thing or another, but unless you also move your head from side to side, it’s difficult to gain much sense of objects’ relative distances,” Crozier says. “If your viewpoint is fixed in one position, as a microscope would be, it’s a challenging problem.”
Offering a workaround, Crozier and graduate student Antony Orth essentially compute how the image would look if it were taken from a different angle. To do this, they rely on the clues encoded within the rays of light entering the camera.
“Arriving at each pixel, the light’s coming at a certain angle, and that contains important information,” explains Crozier. “Cameras have been developed with all kinds of new hardware—microlens arrays and absorbing masks—that can record the direction of the light, and that allows you to do some very interesting things, such as take a picture and focus it later, or change the perspective view. That’s great, but the question we asked was, can we get some of that functionality with a regular camera, without adding any extra hardware?” [Keep reading…]
Source: opli.net