LIMITATIONS OF TRADITIONAL DIGITAL CAMERAS

A typical traditional digital camera suffers from one or more of the following limitations. (i) It has a limited visual field, so it can capture objects within a narrow cone of visual angles. (ii) It has a limited depth of field, so objects within only a certain depth range are captured in focus. (iii) It has a limited dynamic range, so brightness variations outside (i.e., darker or brighter than) this brightness range are lost. (iv) It does not capture frames at a sufficiently high rate, e.g., to image fast moving objects without excessive blurring. (v) The resolution (number of pixels capturing a given scene detail or per degree of the field of view) varies across the image. (vi) The entire image is not acquired from a single viewpoint; thus the camera behaves like a cluster of nearby, smaller field of view cameras, acquiring a set of discontinuous, small subimages, rather than a seamless, contiguous, single image.