Patent ID: 8471897

Claim:
A method for the real-time acquisition of the visual information of three-dimensional scenes comprising: (a) measuring an object space by a camera comprising an objective lens, a lenslet array located in the image space of the objective lens and a sensor placed in the focal point of the lenslets, and (b) calculating a focal stack associated with the object space measured by the camera from the discrete plenoptic function thereof, ƒ(s,t,j,k), which comprises evaluating the photographic formation integral, E r (j,k)=∫∫ƒ(u,v,·r+j,v·r+k)du dv, as a sum along the length of planes in a 4D hypercube, u, v being the horizontal and vertical dimensions on the plane of the lens, and j, k, r being the horizontal, vertical and depth dimensions of the focal stack to be obtained, said evaluation of the photographic formation integral in turn comprising the following steps: (b1) at the start of the computation, making the captured data, ƒ(s,t,j,k), be equal to the transformed data up to step 0, f ~ 0 ⁡ ( r , s , t , j , k ) ; and (b2) applying n=log 2 N times the following partial transformation: f ~ m + 1 ( r 0 , … ⁢ , r m - 1 ︸ ρ : m ⁢ ⁢ bits , r m ︸ r : m + 1 ⁢ ⁢ bits , s m + 1 , … ⁢ , s n - 1 ︸ s : n - m - 1 ⁢ ⁢ bits , t m + 1 , … ⁢ , t n - 1 ︸ t : n - m - 1 ⁢ ⁢ bits ︷ 2 ⁢ n - m - 1 ⁢ ⁢ bits , j , k ) = f ~ m ⁡ ( ρ , 0 , s , 0 , t , j , k ) + f ~ m ⁡ ( ρ , 1 , s , 0 , t , j + r m + λ ⁡ ( ρ ) , k ) + f ~ m ⁡ ( ρ , 0 , s , 1 , t , j , k + r m + λ ⁡ ( ρ ) ) + f ~ m ⁡ ( ρ , 1 , s , 1 , t , j + r m + λ ⁡ ( ρ ) , k + r m + λ ⁡ ( ρ ) ) , where p=(r 0 , . . . , r m−1 ), s=(s m+1 , . . . , s n−1 ), t=(t m+1 , . . . , t n−1 ), and λ ⁡ ( u 0 , … ⁢ , u n - 1 ) = ∑ i = 0 n - 1 ⁢ 2 i · u i , until obtaining f ~ n ⁡ ( r , s , t , j , k ) = f ( r ︸ n , j , k ) , which approximates the photographic formation integral E r (j,k) for a volume of N depth planes.