High dynamic range imaging using a plenoptic camera

Light field (or plenoptic) imaging has become an attractive research field due to its post-capture capabilities, including refocusing, perspective change and depth estimation. Micro-lens array based cameras that recently emerged have made the light field acquisition process a practical task. In this paper, we propose to convert such a plenoptic camera into a high-dynamic range camera through a minor optical modification. The optical modification is an optical mask placed in front of the main lens to increases the vignetting effect, which darkening towards the borders of the image plane due to loss of light. As a result, different parts of the dynamic range are captured with different sub-aperture images of the light field. These sub-aperture images are then fused through photometric registration and optical flow vectors to produce a high-dynamic range image.