Plenoptic Sensor : Application to Extend Field-of-View

In this paper we study the light field sampling produced by ideal plenoptic sensors, an emerging technology providing new optical capabilities. In particular, we leverage its potential with a new optical design that couples a pyramid lens with an ideal plenoptic sensor. The main advantage is that it extends the field-of-view (FOV) of a main-lens without changing its focal length. To evince the utility of the proposed design we have performed different experiments. First, we demonstrate on simulated synthetic images that our optical design effectively doubles the FOV. Then, we show its feasibility with two different prototypes using plenoptic cameras on the market with very different plenoptic samplings, namely a Raytrix R5 and a Canon 5D MarkIV. Arguably, future cameras with ideal plenoptic sensors will be able to be coupled with pyramid lenses to extend its inherent FOV in a single snapshot.