A Low Cost Multi-Camera Array

I've had the privilege of being a part of the light field team at Google that designed and engineered "The Sentinel". The Sentinel is a multi-camera system for recording panoramic light field video. It was built for the purpose of being a reasonably low cost capture solution for DeepView.

The rig contains 47 action sports cameras distrubuted on the surface of a hemispherical, 0.92 meter diameter plastic dome. The system captures a wide baseline of 0.8 meters, high resolution (over 15 pixels per degree), large field of view (over 220°) light fields at 30 frames per second.

I had the opportunity of using this rig to capture the light fields seen in the DeepView paper. Many of the challenges of using a rig like this has to do with offloading the data and getting it ingested in a structure that is usable for a processing pipeline. I created some of the scripts to help make this process quicker and easier.