SLFT: A physically accurate framework for Tracing Synthetic Light Fields

Udyan Khurana, Parikshit Sakurikar, P. J. Narayanan

Abstract: A light field is a 4D function which captures all the radiance information of a scene. Image-based creation of light fields reconstructs the 4D space using pre-captured imagery from various views and employs refocusing to generate output images. Handheld cameras can also capture light fields using a microlens array between the sensor and the main lens, but physical constraints limit their spatial and angular resolutions. In this paper, we present a GPU based synthetic light field rendering framework that is robust and physically accurate. We demonstrate the equivalence of the standard light field camera representation with light slab representation for synthetic light fields and exhibit the capability of our framework to trace light fields of resolutions much higher than available in commercial plenoptic cameras. The light slab is rich in quality but bulky to store. Our system provides parameters to balance the quality and storage requirements. We also present a compact representation of the 4D light slabs using a video compression codec and demonstrate different quality-size combinations using these representations.