Gathering light
Kari Pulli
Computational Imaging at Light, USA
: J Comput Eng Inf Technol
Abstract
With digital cameras in every cell phone, everyone is a photographer. But people still aspire to the better zoom, the lower noise, and the artistic bokeh effects provided by the digital SLR cameras, if only these features were available in as convenient and light-weight a package as a cell phone or a thin compact camera. Traditional high-end cameras have a big lens system that enables those features, but the drawback is weight, bulk, and inconvenience of carrying and switching lenses. In this talk, we discuss an alternative approach of using a heterogenous array of small cameras to provide those features, and more. Light’s camera technology combines prime lenses that provide an optical zoom equivalent of 35 mm, 70 mm, and 150 mm lenses. Small mirrors allow reconfiguring the cameras to select the right level of zoom and field of view. This talk describes the architecture of this flexible computational camera.