The ERC advanced grant CLIM of Christine Guillemot started in September 2016.

Taking views or pictures of a scene is all about capturing light rays emitted by the scene and which converge through lenses on digital sensors. While 2D imaging systems capture in one image point the sum of all the light rays emitted by one scene point over the lens aperture, novel camera designs search instead to measure the light along each ray reaching the camera sensors and not only the sum of rays striking each point in the image. These designs go from arrays of cameras capturing the scene from slightly different viewpoints, to single cameras mounted on moving gantries and plenoptic cameras, using arrays of microlenses in front of the photosensor to obtain angular information about the captured scene.

The recorded flow of rays, called the light field, yields a rich description of the scene ideally suited for advanced image creation capabilities from a single capture, such as simulating a capture with a different focus and a different depth of field, simulating lenses with different apertures, for creating images with different artistic intents or for producing 3D views. Light fields technology holds great promises for a number of application sectors, such as photography, augmented reality, light field microscopy, to name only a few.

The goal of the ERC-CLIM project is to develop algorithms for the entire static and video light fields processing chain, going from compact sparse and low rank representations and compression to restoration, high quality rendering and editing.