Light field

The light field is a vector function that describes the amount of light flowing in every direction through every point in space. The space of all possible light rays is given by the five-dimensional plenoptic function, and the magnitude of each ray is given by its radiance. Michael Faraday was the first to propose that light should be interpreted as a field, much like the magnetic fields on which he had been working. The phrase light field was coined by Andrey Gershun in a classic 1936 paper on the radiometric properties of light in three-dimensional space. Modern approaches to light-field display explore co-designs of optical elements and compressive computation to achieve higher resolutions, increased contrast, wider fields of view, and other benefits. The term “radiance field” may also be used to refer to similar concepts. The term is used in modern research such as neural radiance fields. For geometric optics—i.e., to incoherent light and to objects larger than the wavelength of light—the fundamental carrier of light is a ray. The measure for the amount of light traveling along a ray is radiance, denoted by L and measured in , i.e., watts (W) per steradian (sr) per meter squared (m2). The steradian is a measure of solid angle, and meters squared are used as a measure of cross-sectional area, as shown at right. The radiance along all such rays in a region of three-dimensional space illuminated by an unchanging arrangement of lights is called the plenoptic function. The plenoptic illumination function is an idealized function used in computer vision and computer graphics to express the image of a scene from any possible viewing position at any viewing angle at any point in time. It is not used in practice computationally, but is conceptually useful in understanding other concepts in vision and graphics. Since rays in space can be parameterized by three coordinates, x, y, and z and two angles θ and φ, as shown at left, it is a five-dimensional function, that is, a function over a five-dimensional manifold equivalent to the product of 3D Euclidean space and the 2-sphere.