Vision Without Perspective
If you could capture any
set of light rays, which ones would you choose? Most cameras are designed to
capture perspective images, generated from light rays that converge at a single
point in space. This design choice is very natural for creating images that
humans can easily view and interpret, since our eyes are also perspective sensors.
It is less clear what advantage perspective imaging might have for 3D photography
and other computer vision applications. Non-perspective sensing opens up an
exciting new realm of possibilities. This talk explores a range of strange,
new, non-perspective images that are optimized for the purposes of 3D photography.
These non-perspective images may be generated by capturing a sequence of images
from a standard camera with varying position or illumination to produce an XYT
volume of image data, and slicing this image volume in special ways. I will
present several examples of such images and their applications for 3D photography.