CS 448A - Topics in Computer Graphics

Computational photography

A cutaway view showing some of the optical and electronic components in a Canon 5D - one of the most capable prosumer digital cameras (image from Canon USA).	Stanford's multi-camera array. In the arrangement shown above, 100 VGA cameras are combined to create a 30 megapixel virtual video camera.	By inserting a microlens array into a conventional handheld camera, one can create a plenoptic camera, which can record a light field in a single snapshot.	The photographs produced by a plenoptic camera can be refocused after they are captured, and the viewpoint can be moved. Click above for an example of digital refocusing.	Dual photography lets us read a hidden playing card from its reflection in the page of a book. The card's face is shown at lower-right.

Time Winter Quarter, 2006, Tue/Thu 2:45 - 4:00 Place 392 Gates Hall (graphics lab conference room)

Instructors Marc Levoy and Hendrik Lensch Office hours Marc: Tue/Thu, 11:00 - 12:15 (Gates 366) Hendrik: Mon/Wed 1:00 - 2:00 (Gates 364)

Course material

• Course announcement (with abstract and requirements)
• Annotated reading list (slightly out-of-date, but being constantly updated)
• Class schedule (click here for lecture notes)
• Ideas for projects
• Links to the three papers we'll be discussing in class on Tuesday:
  • A. Fitzgibbon, Y. Wexler, A. Zisserman, Image-Based Rendering Using Image-Based Priors, Prof. ICCV 2003. Best paper award (Marr Prize).
  • Y. Wexler E. Shechtman M. Irani, Space-Time Video Completion, Proc. CVPR 2004. Best poster award.
  • Y. Wexler D. Simakov, Space-Time Scene Manifolds, Proc. ICCV 2005.
  Videos for the latter two papers are available on Yoni's web site. They are worth looking at.

• Links to the two papers on wavefront coding that we'll be discussing in class on Thursday:
  • Cathey, W.T., Dowski, E.R., New paradigm for imaging systems, Applied Optics, Vol. 41, No. 29, 10 October 2002.
  • Johnson, G.E., Dowski, E.R.,Jr., , Cathey, W.T., Passive ranging through wave-front coding: information and application, Applied Optics, Vol. 39, No. 11, 10 April 2000.
  For the brave, here are two additional papers. Reading them is optional (see my email):
  • Dowski, E.R.,Jr., Cathey, W.T., Extended depth of field through wave-front coding, Applied Optics, Vol. 34, No. 11, 10 April 1995, pp. 1859-1866.
  • Arnison, M.R., Cogswelly, C.J., Sheppard, C.J.R., Török, P., Wavefront Coding Fluorescence Microscopy Using High Aperture Lenses, Optical imaging and microscopy - Techniques and Advanced Systems, Springer-Verlag, 2003.
• Link to web pages on coded aperture imaging
  • Zand, J., Coded aperture imaging in high energy astronomy, NASA Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics (LHEA) at NASA's GSFC, 1996.
  • Carlisle, P., Mmm, gumballs....
• Lectures for SIGGRAPH 2006 course on Computational Photography:
  1. Computational Imaging in the Sciences
  2. Light Field Photography

Material about related ongoing research in our lab

• Our project to build a multi-camera array.
• Our research on light fields and computational photography.
• Our NSF proposal (February 2002) on high-performance imaging using an array of low-cost cameras
• Our DARPA grant proposal (February 2003) on synthetic aperture photography
• Our latest NSF proposal (June 2005) on active computational imaging using a dense array of projectors and cameras
  Please do not distribute this proposal (or its ideas) beyond the Stanford community!
• Our CVPR 2004 paper on plane+parallax calibration of camera arrays.
• Our CVPR 2004 paper on high-speed imaging using a dense camera array.
• Our SIGGRAPH 2004 paper on synthetic aperture confocal imaging.
• Our CVPR 2005 workshop paper on Synthetic Aperture Focusing using a Shear-Warp Factorization of the Viewing Transform.
• Our SIGGRAPH 2005 paper on the High Performance Imaging Using Large Camera Arrays.
• Our SIGGRAPH 2005 paper on Dual Photography.
• Our SIGGRAPH 2005 paper on Fourier Slice Photography and a tech report on our handheld plenoptic camera.