Hand-held aperture-sharing camera for a multiview image set

A hand-held camera that is capable of acquiring full parallax multiview images is introduced. Since the camera is based on spatial sharing of the aperture stop of a digital camera, it is easy to manufacture. The aperture stop is spatially shared by a 2D high-speed liquid crystal (LC) shutter array that is fixed on the front surface of the camera objective. The shutter array consists of 8×8 LC shutters to acquire 8×8 multiview images. The equivalent optical configuration of the camera is not different from that of a parallel-type multiview camera array. Each of the multiview images has an equal disparity from its neighbors and has the full detector resolution of the camera. The disparity is small enough to be used in light field imaging. The depth resolution and the resolvable number of depth layers calculated from the configuration are not different from those obtained experimentally.