External Mask Based Depth and Light Field Camera

Dikpal Reddy, Jiamin Bai, Ravi Ramamoorthi; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) Workshops, 2013, pp. 37-44

We present a method to convert a digital single-lensreflex (DSLR) camera into a high resolution consumer depth and light field camera by affixing an external aperture mask to the main lens. Compared to the existing consumer depth and light field cameras, our camera is easy to construct with minimal additional costs and our design is camera and lens agnostic. The main advantage of our design is the ease of switching between an SLR camera and a native resolution depth/light field camera. Using an external mask is an important advantage over current light field camera designs since we do not need to modify the internals of the camera or the lens. Our camera sequentially acquires the angular components of the light field of a static scene by changing the location of the aperture in the mask. A consequence of our design is that the external aperture causes heavy vignetting in the acquired images. We calibrate the mask parameters and estimate multi-view scene depth under vignetting. In addition to depth, we show light field applications such as refocusing and defocus blur at the sensor resolution.