Understanding camera trade-offs through a Bayesian analysis of light field projections - A revision
Computer vision has traditionally focused on extracting structure,such as depth, from images acquired using thin-lens or pinholeoptics. The development of computational imaging is broadening thisscope; a variety of unconventional cameras do not directly capture atraditional image anymore, but instead require the jointreconstruction of structure and image information. For example, recentcoded aperture designs have been optimized to facilitate the jointreconstruction of depth and intensity. The breadth of imaging designs requires new tools to understand the tradeoffs implied bydifferent strategies. This paper introduces a unified framework for analyzing computational imaging approaches.Each sensor element is modeled as an inner product over the 4D light field.The imaging task is then posed as Bayesian inference: giventhe observed noisy light field projections and a new prior on light field signals, estimate the original light field. Under common imaging conditions, we compare theperformance of various camera designs using 2D light field simulations. Thisframework allows us to better understand the tradeoffs of each camera type and analyze their limitations.