Assessment of plenoptic imaging for reconstruction of 3D discrete and continuous luminous fields

Volumetric tomography has become an indispensable tool for flow diagnostics. However, it usually suffers from high experimental costs as multiple cameras are required in a typical tomographic system. Plenoptic imaging (PI) is a promising alternative which can simultaneously record spatial and angular information using only one single camera. Although PI has been pioneered by a few groups for 3D flow imaging, this particular application is still at its early stage of development and there are some aspects that need further investigation. In this work, we will systematically assess three representative tomographic algorithms for PI via numerical studies. In addition, we show here how 3D PI inversion can be interpreted from a tomographic perspective and how to conveniently perform the calibration with an existing well-established method which can take into account the effect of lens distortion. A proof-of-concept experiment was also conducted, and the conclusions drawn were consistent with those from numerical studies. Although this work was discussed under the context of flow/flame imaging, the general conclusions are also applicable to other application fields, such as biomedical imaging.