Despite my interest in digital photography and an investment in a snazzy Nikon D70 about a year ago, my photo skills are still somewhat lacking. As a result, my photos are sometimes blurry and, in the end, I put many of them in the trash.
That in mind, I’m particularly interested in the work of Ren Ng, who is currently at Stanford getting a Ph.D. in CS. In one project, he (and a team of others) is developing a new type of digital camera that lets you refocus an acquired image at different depths after the photo has already been exposed. This means you could take pictures without worrying much about focus; later, you could fix images so they clearly captured any particular area of interest.
For example, the photos below were created from a single exposure based on a prototype camera:
You can learn more about this by reading Ren’s technical paper.
Unclear how much the technology will cost, but I doubt it will be cheap. However, in addition to consumer applications, I think there could be a large market opportunity in commerical and government use.
(via Wired)
it’s actually just a microlens array placed over the CCD, so it’s just optics plus a hell of a lot of computation. the main problem is that this drastically reduces resolution so the images they take are now at a sub-vga resolution.
Left by joshua on November 22nd, 2005