Light Fields — from Display to 4D Algorithms
The light field is a 4D record of a scene's rays — how do we present it to humans, interact with it, and process it computationally?
A light field captures the radiance at every point in space, in every direction — a 4D function that fully describes how light fills a scene. Captured light fields enable refocusing, depth recovery, and parallax view synthesis; displayed light fields offer glasses-free 3D. The challenge is data density: 4D content stresses capture devices, display hardware, and processing pipelines.
Two sub-arcs sit in this thread. The first (2012–2015) targets light field displays — an Emerging Technologies demo of painting directly into a glasses-free 3D display, content-adaptive lenticular prints that reshape the lenslet array to the captured light field, and a UIST paper that turns that lenslet array into a joint display-and-pen-input surface. The second (2019–2021), led by Numair Khan with Min H. Kim at KAIST, develops dense algorithms over captured 4D content: view-consistent superpixels via epipolar-plane image segmentation, edge-aware bidirectional diffusion for depth, and a differentiable diffusion routine for sparse-to-dense depth from multi-view images.
Authors
Marc Alexa · Simon Heinzle · Stanislav Jakuschevskij · Lucas Kasser · Jan Kautz · Numair Khan · Min H. Kim · Wojciech Matusik · James McCann · Jim McCann · Samuel Muff · Hanspeter Pfister · Henry Stone · Qian Zhang
