Light-field Technology

A light-field is defined by the light rays within a specific area. If all light rays are captured within a scene, it is possible to generate a perspective from any position. Although the complete capture of a light-field for a full scene is currently not possible, a large portion can still be acquired under special conditions. This is a major advantage when editing scenes during the postproduction process.

Researchers in the Moving Picture Technologies department at Fraunhofer IIS are already demonstrating how scenes can be optimized using a set-up with professional cameras in a planar arrangement that capture slightly different scene perspectives. This opens up new creative opportunities such as virtual camera panning and zooming, all with a single light-field recording.

Usually, if the focus was incorrectly set during shooting or the perspective has to be changed, time-consuming and expensive retakes would be necessary. The use of intelligent algorithms and a set-up of high-quality cameras in a planar arrangement that provide multiple simultaneous views opens the door to new post-production possibilities.

The algorithms developed by Fraunhofer IIS offer a wide range of editing features, the camera perspective can, for example, be virtually shifted or expanded, as if the camera was actually moved, even though it was stationary during shooting. Another example would be the so-called dolly zoom effect, which works without moving the physical light-field camera.

The system can create 3D views from the existing depth information and plug-ins can be integrated into the post-production software for added creativity during the editing process, such as the Realception^® Plug-ins for Nuke and Unreal Engine. The light-field recording system is also suitable for the production of stop-motion films where the camera remains stationary.

The RealVision network brings together leading universities, research centres focused on industrial development and companies to train a new generation of highly-skilled scientists and entrepreneurs in the area of hyper-realistic imaging, encoding and display technologies for the creation of high-quality accurate imaginery of realistic digital video.

The video below summarizes the team building and training school hosted by Fraunhofer IIS in the context of the Realvision project. The aim of this training school was to introduce the early stage researchers (ESRs) with topics related to light-field capturing and processing through series of lectures from the experts of the field, followed by practical sessions.

ETN-FPI is a four year (2015-2019) Innovative Training Network, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement. It brings together eight beneficiaries and eight partner organizations from Finland, Sweden, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Hungary and Singapore, with the aim of training a new generation of researchers in the area of full parallax imaging. This will be achieved by hiring talented 15 early stage researchers and training them to become future research leaders in this area.

Fraunhofer IIS and Max-Planck Insitute for Informatics introduce a real-time multi-view correspondence algorithm that extracts multi-view depth maps from sparse, wide-baseline light-field video to produce high-quality novel views for virtual effects such as apertures or virtual camera positions.

On set more and more cameras and camera arrays are used to generate additional views and data for visual effects or depth maps information. Together with the German Stuttgart Media University HDM, the team Computational Imaging of Fraunhofer´s Department Moving Picture Technologies set up a project to evaluate and demonstrates the potential of shooting with multi-camera arrays and light-field processing.

This project results in a short live-action pilot clip called "Coming Home" which impressively shows the possibility and performance of light-field processing in a real production workflow. The break-down movie demonstrates the requirements and conditions on set.