Eye design in the plenoptic space of light rays

Natural eye designs are optimized with regard to the tasks the eye-carrying organism has to perform for survival. This optimization has been performed by the process of natural evolution over many millions of years. Every eye captures a subset of the space of light rays. The information contained in this subset and the accuracy to which the eye can extract the necessary information determines an upper limit on how well an organism can perform a given task. In this work we propose a new methodology for camera design. By interpreting eyes as sample patterns in light ray space we can phrase the problem of eye design in a signal processing framework. This allows us to develop mathematical criteria for optimal eye design, which in turn enables us to build the best eye for a given task without the trial and error phase of natural evolution. The principle is evaluated on the task of 3D ego-motion estimation.