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Comment by jnevelson | Hacker News Reader

So Google basically took what Lytro has been using hardware to achieve, and did it entirely in software. Pretty impressive.

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The difference is that Lytro actually does it, instead of simulating it.

It'd be fun to play around with the software to see in which cases it breaks (perhaps taking a photo of a framed landscape photo with another landscape behind, for example)

Lytro is also "just" simulating it, but with slightly more/different data. They capture a light field but that doesn't magically give them depth values; they have to estimate them using an optimization, and then render the final image using a very similar algorithm.

Edit: Whoops: I mis-read the article; 'Lens Blur' uses multiple frames. That lets you get a lot more information.

Well, The Lytro will still win on moving subjects where a sequence convolves subject motion with the depth map.

In reality the Lytro has abysmal performance, which questions the value of lightfield technology as a whole.

Instead of capturing the 'light field' you may as well capture most of the image.

Secondly the loss of the 2nd derivative of the k-vector makes lightfield currently unsuitable for use in a microscope (although they are working on it...). Although there might be better techniques for refocusing, such as division in the spatial frequency domain.

see http://www.cnet.com.au/nokia-vs-lytro-the-refocusing-challen...

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