The most eye-opening demonstration at the NVIDIA GPU Technology
Conference last week was from Adobe’s David Salesin (Sr.
Principal Scientist) and Todor Georgiev (Sr Research Scientist),
who showed their Plenoptic Lens along with software for
processing the resulting images. There was a gasp of amazement
from the audience when we saw what the process is capable of. We
saw an image refocused after the event. For anyone who has ever
taken an out of focus picture – which I guess is everyone – the
immediate reaction is to want one NOW. Another appealing idea is
to take an image that has several items of interest, but at
different depths, and shift the focus from one to another. So
how does it work? It starts with the plenoptic lens, which lets
you “capture multiple views of the scene from slightly different
viewpoints,” said Salesin: If you have a high resolution sensor
then each one of those images can be fairly high resolution. The
neat thing is that with software, with computation, you can put
this together int