Development of airborne light field photography

Light field photography offers a new approach to digitally captured images. These commercially available cameras are able to capture the 4D light field in a single image. This allows for a variety of image processing capabilities that traditional cameras do not offer. For example, the image can be digitally refocused after it is captured and its depth can be estimated. In terms of application, these capabilities could be beneficial on airborne platforms. However, a limitation of currently available light field cameras is that they are not fully functional at medium or long ranges. If these cameras were to capture light fields at longer ranges, they would have a practical application when mounted on low-flying aircrafts. This dissertation takes current light field photography techniques and modifies them so they work better to capture medium-range images. The majority of cameras that capture the 4D light field use a microlens array to modulate the incoming light before it hits the image sensor. Previous work using printed modulation masks garnered the same effect obtained by microlens arrays. This dissertation details the development of a modulation mask that has medium-range applications. A new way of extracting the 4D light field from raw images that uses a digital Fourier transform is presented. This method works for images captured with microlens arrays and printed mask cameras. Two prototype cameras were built and tested to demonstrate some of these concepts. The concepts demonstrated by these cameras could be used in the future designs of light field cameras.