Light field imaging has received great attention recently due to its ability to provide high-fidelity visual capture and interactive visual experience based on rich spatio-angular light ray representations. Many tech giants investing in immersive display technologies have pointed towards the power of light field imaging for achieving ultra-realistic visual experiences, in which a user can walk into a real scene, freely move his/her head with the called Six Degrees of Freedom (6-DoF), and realistically perceive every little detail about the materials and lighting. In this context, new prototype systems have been proposed for capturing, processing, and rendering light fields. Moreover, the recent advent of high-quality consumer Head Mounted Displays (HMD) with positional head tracking, and autostereoscopic light field displays provide novel and compelling opportunities for visualizing light fields in new commercial media applications. In addition, the consumers can already have a glimpse of the light field capturing systems capabilities with the multi-camera smartphones that have been recently launched. However, systems for light field imaging faces unique challenges due in part to the large volume of data that must be captured, processed, and displayed. Although various efforts have been recently initiated, mainly for still light field images, there are still many open questions for enabling ultra-realistic and interactive light field visual experiences. This talk will present some of the challenges on light field processing and discuss the recent advances in this field.

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light field,image processing,video processing,immersive technologies