Cameras are everywhere and have become an integral part of all sorts of problem solving, think of applications in fields like agriculture, traffic monitoring, autonomous robots, security, sports analysis and what not. Most of all, they have become a primary mode of documenting our day to day life and special moments. Cameras are packaged in all sorts of form factors: phones, cars, drones, rovers, glasses etc. etc. The field of computer vision (working with images) has exploded over the past couple of decades and continues to be a major pillar of the tech ecosystem in general.
Images are not limited to technology but have a deep rooted history as a medium of creative expression. Paintings, a form of image, have existed for more than thousands of years and the first permanent photographic image was created using a camera obscura just about a couple of centuries ago.
The idea of this talk is to introduce the audience to the fundamentals of how a camera sees the real world and captures the light information from a scene to an actual digital image file, what actually goes into this file and the possibilities that lie beyond it. The talk also aims to introduce the audience to the fundamentals of photography leveraging the smartphones in our pockets.
The talk aims to inculcate curiosity around the beautiful field of imaging and photography. It also aims to induce inspiration to pursue conscious creative expression through this by creating a bridge between technology and art.
Note: I am building a open source computational photography library using C++20, currently focussed on HDR merge. This project has no external dependencies (except for FFT and Eigen) and implements all the maths and algorithms from first principles. The long term vision is to build this as a computation photography Software ISP that plugs on top of camera frameworks like libcamera.