LFDisplay:

a real-time system for light field microscopy



LFDisplay is an open-source, cross-platform, GPU-accelerated software package for real-time viewing of microscope light fields. When used in conjunction with a light field microscope (LFM) such as the one pictured at left above designed by Logan Grosenick and Todd Anderson, it allows the user to interactively explore a specimen under the microscope through the use of virtual tilting and refocusing. This gives the user a three-dimensional feel of the specimen normally not available through the use of ordinary optical microscopy. To see a movie of LFDisplay in action, look at the April 8, 2007 article in our light field micrograph archive. For more information, consult the documentation (also linked below).
LFDisplay uses the graphics processing unit (GPU) found on everyday personal computers to perform real-time light field rendering and refocusing. The input light field is loaded into the GPU and processed using shaders (part of the OpenGL 2.0 specifications). It currently supports streaming raw light field images from a QImaging Retiga 4000R camera, as well as loading pre-recorded light field images from disk. Running in the latter mode, it can be used to view any light field stored as a 2D image in the format described in Ren Ng's 2005 technical report on the light field camera. However, LFDisplay's user interface is customized for microscopy.
LFDisplay was developed by Zhengyun Zhang and Marc Levoy of the Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory. It was written in Python and uses the Qt framework from Nokia through the PyQt wrapper. It is released under the GNU General Public License 2.0 open source license. The software package is based on the idea of light field microscopy, first published in a SIGGRAPH 2006 paper.

Resources


License

This software package is copyright 2010 the Board of Trustees of The Leland Stanford Junior University. It is released under the GNU General Public License 2.0.

Contact

Please contact us at graphics-lfdisplay@lists.stanford.edu if you have any questions, comments or suggestions about the software.