Portable light field cameras have demonstrated capabilities beyond conventional cameras. In a single snapshot, they enable digital image refocusing, i.e., the ability to change the camera focus after taking the snapshot, and 3D reconstruction.
We show that they also achieve a larger depth of field than conventional cameras while maintaining the ability to reconstruct detail at high resolution.
Crucial to the success of the light field camera is the way it samples the light field, trading off spatial vs. angular resolution, and how aliasing affects the light field. These systems are commercially available for consumer photography, and have also been applied to microscopy.

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Bio

Paolo Favaro is full professor at the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he heads the Computer Vision Group. He received the Laurea degree (B.Sc.+M.Sc.) from Università di Padova, Italy in 1999, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and 2003 respectively. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the computer science department of the University of California, Los Angeles and subsequently in Cambridge University, UK. Between 2004 and 2006 he worked in medical imaging at Siemens Corporate Research, Princeton, USA. From 2006 to 2011 he was Lecturer and then Reader at Heriot-Watt University and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His research interests are in computer vision, computational photography, machine learning, and signal and image processing.