

Prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner - aristidb
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/10/pelican-imagings-prototype-array-camera-could-make-your-picture/

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Groxx
The video is fascinating, but a complete fabrication in terms of actual
consumer products. The plank at 2:50 is an excellent example: to see past the
plank entirely, the camera array would have to be _wider_ than the plank.
Probably 6 inches or so, in that case.

We may see it, and multiple smaller lenses could indeed solve the crappy-focus
problems, and still keep the resolution high. But until I see a _legitimate_
demonstration, I highly doubt the shiny through-occlusion tracking will work
as well in any product using it. Better than current cameras, certainly - it
can still track depth - but _nothing_ like their examples.

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seanalltogether
I agree, I'm not sure I can comprehend a situation in which capturing the
central figure with such high visibility is worth destroying the rest of the
video frame.

edit - Maybe it would be good for scientists tracking animals, however the
distance they shoot from would require a very wide array of cameras.

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joshu
So, a lens is a mechanism for doing a significant amount of computation. All
this does is move some of that computation from optics to software.

If you take out some of the optics from a real lens you get a blurry image
too. That doesn't mean the remaining lenses aren't doing something useful --
or that the output is bad. It just needs further processing.

Post-processing, you end up with interesting images.

More examples: <http://www.refocusimaging.com/gallery/>

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electromagnetic
I'd be interested in what this kind of array could do if it could be used to
take cinema-quality video with your examples level of post-processing.

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joshu
I love computational photography.

For a better understanding of how this works, watch the video at:
<http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/>

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daniel_reetz
Totally! Array cameras and coded apertures ahoy. I'm convinced that CompPhoto
stuff has a lot to offer - now that we've seen the technology _can_ work, even
on a DIY level, it's time to get it in the hands of people that will actually
use it. Mobile phones are a good way to do that. Glad to see Pelican going
this way.

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joshu
I would love to build one of these myself.

Anyone up for building a photography research lab??

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daniel_reetz
I have ideas and experience. We've met IRL...

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daniel_reetz
In fact, I'm even working on some of the super-low-budget stuff we talked
about at FOO East.

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joshu
Oh, awesome! I can't wait to hear more.

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makmanalp
I'm curious whether this is actually going to work in practice, because the
see-throughish behavior leads me to think that there's a large separation
distance between the individual cameras in the experiments (perhaps the test
cameras are too large to bring them, say, 0.2 mm apart) whereas this would not
be the case on a tiny cellphone camera.

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shadowpwner
Yeah, that's correct. The video has almost absolutely nothing to do with the
actual content.

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nitrogen
Does this have any connection to the multi-lensed eyes of insects?

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Synaesthesia
No,with insects, every lens on their eyes is like a single pixel, and looking
in a different direction - this combines multiple images and they're looking
in the same direction.

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iuygtfrikuj
First the picture shows a finished conventional camera module, packaged and
including the focus, zoom drives, cable and connector. The concept camera
apparently doesn't need any PCB or link to the camera.

The limit on cellphone cameras isn't optical it's computational - the CPU and
battery power isn't there to stream more than VGA resolution movies at 60fps,
so how is it going to do the image combination for this?

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Synaesthesia
The computational limits are very rapidly disappearing. Check Anandtech's
story on the new ARM A15 processors. We are seeing generational leaps in
processing power very frequently.

