Today I read a paper titled “Light-field Microscopy with a Consumer Light-field Camera”
The abstract is:
We explore the use of inexpensive consumer light- field camera technology for the purpose of light-field mi- croscopy.
Our experiments are based on the Lytro (first gen- eration) camera.
Unfortunately, the optical systems of the Lytro and those of microscopes are not compatible, lead- ing to a loss of light-field information due to angular and spatial vignetting when directly recording microscopic pic- tures.
We therefore consider an adaptation of the Lytro op- tical system.
We demonstrate that using the Lytro directly as an oc- ular replacement, leads to unacceptable spatial vignetting.
However, we also found a setting that allows the use of the Lytro camera in a virtual imaging mode which prevents the information loss to a large extent.
We analyze the new vir- tual imaging mode and use it in two different setups for im- plementing light-field microscopy using a Lytro camera.
As a practical result, we show that the camera can be used for low magnification work, as e.g. common in quality control, surface characterization, etc.