Virtual Computational Camera

In computational camera research, people design unconventional optics to sample the light field in a way that is radically different from the traditional camera and preserve new forms of visual information for various appli-cations. When one has an idea of optics de-sign, it is very often that an evaluation based on simulation has to be conducted first be-fore building a real system. However, how to quickly simulate an unconventional camera is often a challenging problem even with profes-sional optical design software (e.g. Zemax). First, these software is designed for optics researches and usually do not support light field, which is a central concept in computa-tional camera research. Secondly, researchers have to spend plenty of time in designing de-tailed physical profiles of optical elements. In this project, we develop a framework of vir-tual computational camera for light field pro-cessing. With this framework, one can easily simulate the light field processing of a virtual computational camera. In the proposed framework, we formulate three categories of optics, including linear transform optics (lenses and prisms), dot-production optics (photomasks), and con-volution optics (diffusers and some phase-plates). We propose an efficient computation strategy to render light fields at a decent res-olution. 1