On plenoptic multiplexing and reconstruction

Photography has been striving to capture an ever increasing amount of visual information in a single image. Digital sensors, however, are limited to recording a small subset of the desired information at each pixel. A common approach to overcoming the limitations of sensing hardware is the optical multiplexing of high-dimensional data into a photograph. While this is a well-studied topic for imaging with color filter arrays, we develop a mathematical framework that generalizes multiplexed imaging to all dimensions of the plenoptic function. This framework unifies a wide variety of existing approaches to analyze and reconstruct multiplexed data in either the spatial or the frequency domain. We demonstrate many practical applications of our framework including high-quality light field reconstruction, the first comparative noise analysis of light field attenuation masks, and an analysis of aliasing in multiplexing applications.