LC-based lightfield camera prototype for rapidly creating target images optimized by finely adjusting several key coefficients and a LC-guided refocusing-rendering

• Published in: Optics express 2024-02, Vol.32 (5), p.7220-7242
• Main Authors: Ye, Mao, Gao, Zecheng, Zhu, Wenjie, Liu, Kewei, Wang, Zhe, Zhang, Xinyu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.517843

A lightfield camera prototype is constructed by directly coupling a liquid-crystal (LC) microlens array with an arrayed photosensitive sensor for performing a LC-guided refocusing-rendering imaging attached by computing disparity map and extracting featured contours of targets. The proposed camera prototype presents a capability of efficiently selecting the imaging clarity value of the electronic targets interested. Two coefficients of the calibration coefficient k and the rendering coefficient C are defined for quantitively adjusting LC-guided refocusing-rendering operations about the images acquired. A parameter Dp is also introduced for exactly expressing the local disparity of the electronic patterns selected. A parallel computing architecture based on common GPU through the OpenCL platform is adopted for improving the real-time performance of the imaging algorithms proposed, which can effectively be used to extract the pixel-leveled disparity and the featured target contours. In the proposed lightfield imaging strategy, the focusing plane can be easily selected and/or further adjusted by loading and/or varying the signal voltage applied over the LC microlenses for realizing a rapid or even intelligent autofocusing. The research lays a solid foundation for continuously developing or upgrading current lightfield imaging approaches.