Camera array type plenoptic moving picture acquisition system

We present a camera array based plenoptic image acquisition system and re-focus algorithms for the plenoptic image data acquired using the system. In order to get time-synchronized images with a high resolution of up to 1920 by 1080, we integrated 25 industrial cameras with an external exposure synchronization devices. By using industrial cameras with precise time synchronization functionality, we could acquire synchronized images from the cameras with under-millisecond level accuracy. This capability can be extended to develop plenoptic video data acquisition system that can capture image sequences up to 30 frames per second. In this paper, we describe the parallel architecture for the plenoptic image acquisition system that can handle the enormous amount of data generated from multiple cameras. We also discuss data compression algorithms for the plenoptic images to reduce the amount of data that is necessary for efficiently storing, authoring, and streaming the plenoptic image data. We will analyze the pros and cons of our approach and discuss the limitations of our plenoptic image acquisition system.