Light Field Illumination. A Universal Lighting Approach for Visual Inspection

Choosing a proper lighting approach is a crucial task in designing visual inspection systems. It becomes especially challenging for complex-shaped objects, which change the direction and distribution of incoming light in various ways. We overcome this challenge by constructing a light field display and deploy it as a highly tunable lighting device. By programmatically controlling the spatial position of the individual light sources while simultaneously controlling their angular direction of emission, an object-specific light field can be generated, which highlights the features of the object under test with maximum contrast. We explain the calibration procedure, the rendering pipeline and present first results of the device's performance.