Digital cameras are increasingly used for measurement tasks within engineering scenarios, often being part of metrology platforms. Existing cameras are well equipped to provide 2D information about the fields of view (FOV) they observe, the objects within the FOV, and the accompanying environments. But for some applications these 2D results are not sufficient, specifically applications that require Z dimensional data (depth data) along with the X and Y dimensional data. New designs of camera systems have previously been developed by integrating multiple cameras to provide 3D data, ranging from 2 camera photogrammetry to multiple camera stereo systems. Many earlier attempts to record 3D data on 2D sensors have been completed, and likewise many research groups around the world are currently working on camera technology but from different perspectives; computer vision, algorithm development, metrology, etc. Plenoptic or Lightfield camera technology was defined as a technique over 100 years ago but has remained dormant as a potential metrology instrument. Lightfield cameras utilize an additional Micro Lens Array (MLA) in front of the imaging sensor, to create multiple viewpoints of the same scene and allow encoding of depth information. A small number of companies have explored the potential of lightfield cameras, but in the majority, these have been aimed at domestic consumer photography, only ever recording scenes as relative scale greyscale images. This research considers the potential for lightfield cameras to be used for world scene metrology applications, specifically to record absolute coordinate data. Specific interest has been paid to a range of low cost lightfield cameras to; understand the functional/behavioural characteristics of the optics, identify potential need for optical and/or algorithm development, define sensitivity, repeatability and accuracy characteristics and limiting thresholds of use, and allow quantified 3D absolute scale coordinate data to be extracted from the images. The novel output of this work is; an analysis of lightfield camera system sensitivity leading to the definition of Active Zones (linear data generation good data) and In-active Zones (non-linear data generation poor data), development of bespoke calibration algorithms that remove radial/tangential distortion from the data captured using any MLA based camera, and, a light field camera independent algorithm that allows the delivery of 3D coordinate data in absolute units within a well-defined measurable range from a given camera.

The aim of this thesis is to explain terms like light field, plenoptic camera or digital lens. Also the goal is to explain the principle of rendering the resulting images with the option to select the plane of focus, depth of field, changes in perspective and partial change in the angle of the point of view. The main outputs of this thesis are scripts for rendering images from Lytro camera and the interactive application, which clearly demonstrates the principles of plenoptic sensing.

In recent years, 3D camera products and prototypes based on Integral imaging (II) technique have gradually emerged and gained broad attention. II is a method that spatially samples the natural light (light field) of a scene, usually using a microlens array or a camera array and records the light field using a high resolution 2D image sensor. The large amount of data generated by II and the redundancy it contains together lead to the need for an efficient compression scheme. During recent years, the compression of 3D integral images has been widely researched. Nevertheless, there have not been many approaches proposed regarding the compression of integral videos (IVs). The objective of the thesis is to investigate efficient coding methods for integral videos. The integral video frames used are captured by the first consumer used light field camera Lytro. One of the coding methods is to encode the video data directly by an H.265/HEVC encoder. In other coding schemes the integral video is first converted to an array of sub-videos with different view perspectives. The sub-videos are then encoded either independently or following a specific reference picture pattern which uses a MVHEVC encoder. In this way the redundancy between the multi-view videos is utilized instead of the original elemental images. Moreover, by varying the pattern of the subvideo input array and the number of inter-layer reference pictures, the coding performance can be further improved. Considering the intrinsic properties of the input video sequences, a QP-per-layer scheme is also proposed in this thesis. Though more studies would be required regarding time and complexity constraints for real-time applications as well as dramatic increase of number of views, the methods proposed inthis thesis prove to be an efficient compression for integral videos.