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A Look at Google’s Patent Applications for Light Field Technology

Google’s U.S. patent application 20190124318—originally assigned to Lytro, an American developer of light-field cameras, before it went defunct in March 2018—was published in April 2019.

If you can imagine, Hirsch said, a high dimensional function that parameterizes all the aspects of how light travels, then you have a basic idea of how exciting light field theory is.

Today, with VR goggles and other goggle-less images, which Lumii produces on packages, light field technology is a boon to creating images that look real because of the utilization of considerable amounts of data on how light travels through a space.

The U.S. Patent Application No. 20190124318, published in April 2019 to Google, titled Capturing Light-Field Images with Uneven and/or Incomplete Angular Sampling, ... Light field cameras can be used to capture a four-dimensional light field comprising two spatial dimensions and two angular dimensions. These cameras can capture more versatile images in which focus distance, center of perspective and depth of field can be varied. This patent application describes the possibility that complete and even sampling of the two angular dimensions may not even be required and that a combination of high-resolution image data and depth data may be attained with the same result.

U.S. Patent No. 10129524, titled Depth-Assigned Content for Depth-Enhanced Virtual Reality Images, discloses an example of a light field picture that contains information about the direction of light as it arrives at a sensor. The images generated from the rendering of this data can be associated with different depths.

U.S. Patent No. 10205896, titled Automatic Lens Flare Detection and Correction for Light-Field Images.

See the full story here: https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/06/15/look-googles-patent-applications-light-field-technology/id=110431/