\section{Hypothesis}
\label{chap:goals}
\newtheorem{hyp}{Hypothesis}
\newtheorem{defin}{Definition}
The main scientific contribution is related to the topic of light fields.
The scientific goal of the thesis is to experimentally prove the proposed \hyperref[hypothesis]{Hypothesis} and demonstrate progress beyond the state of the art.
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\textbf{Hypothesis}
\label{hypothesis}
\textit{
A novel method of light field rendering can be designed and implemented that produces all-focused renders directly from input views without exploiting additional depth information, having better visual quality, being computationally more efficient, and having less memory requirements compared to the state of the art.
}
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The proposed method was implemented, and experiments were carried out to measure its performance in visual quality, time, and memory requirements.
The results obtained prove the proposed \hyperref[hypothesis]{Hypothesis}.
The implementation is GPU-accelerated to exploit the contemporary hardware support and enable real-time usage of light fields in industry.

This thesis addresses the main issues that were not efficiently solved in previous state-of-the-art light field rendering methods.
The results presented lead to a complete solution that solves all the light field rendering issues at the same time.
Previous proposals usually focused on selected aspects without taking into account the whole process of light field rendering.
This makes the usage of light fields in real-life scenarios difficult without the proposals in this thesis.

Light field assets are currently not widely used even though they achieve potentially better rendering time performance than state-of-the-art rasterization or ray-tracing methods.
The light field rendering time is near constant and does not depend on the content of the scene.
Even complex materials and scenes can be quickly rendered using this image-based approach.

The aim of the original research described in this chapter is to create a solid ground for light field assets that can be widely used in practice.
The desired result of the proposed method is a novel synthetic view generated from the input set of views representing a discrete light field approximation.
The proposed method is designed for widely spaced discrete light field data.
Narrowly spaced data, for example, taken by plenoptic cameras, are useful for refocusing of the final photo at different distances.
Widely spaced data allow for 3D movement in the scene~\cite{wilburn2005}.
Such assets are meant to be used in 3D applications or cinematography for rendering of arbitrary 3D scenes in real time.
The following goals needed for convenient light field rendering in industry are addressed in this chapter:
\begin{itemize}
  \item Limited memory requirements.
  \item Real-time playback with quality results that allow for efficient GPU implementation.
  \item All-focused view without the need for pre-processing of input images or additional information about the scene.
\end{itemize}

The following sections are based on original papers that were published as incremental results of the research carried out.
These are the core papers describing the novel method proposed in this thesis.