A new adaptive focus measure for shape from focus

Abstract

This paper proposes a new focus measure operator for Shape From Focus to recover a dense depth map of a scene. The method can handle depth discontinuities effectively by using adaptively shaped and weighted support windows. The support window shapes and weights are determined from the image characteristics of the all-focused image of the scene. Similar and closer pixels in the support window get higher weights, which inhibits the problems caused by the depth discontinuities. The size of the support window can be increased conveniently for a more robust depth estimation without introducing any window size related Shape From Focus problems. The large support window sizes also addresses the edge bleeding problem. The experiments on the real and synthetically refocused images show that the introduced ideas work effectively and efficiently in real world applications. © 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.