Efficient reconstruction of all-in-focus images through shifted pinholes from multi-focus images for dense light field synthesis and rendering

Abstract

Scene refocusing beyond extended depth of field for users to observe objects effectively is aimed by researchers in computational photography, microscopic imaging, and so on. Ordinary all-in-focus image reconstruction from a sequence of multi-focus images achieves extended depth of field, where reconstructed images would be captured through a pinhole in the center on the lens. In this paper, we propose a novel method for reconstructing all-in-focus images through shifted pinholes on the lens based on 3D frequency analysis of multi-focus images. Such shifted pinhole images are obtained by a linear combination of multi-focus images with scene-independent 2D filters in the frequency domain. The proposed method enables us to efficiently synthesize dense 4D light field on the lens plane for image-based rendering, especially, robust scene refocusing with arbitrary bokeh. Our novel method using simple linear filters achieves not only reconstruction of all-in-focus images even for shifted pinholes more robustly than the conventional methods depending on scene/focus estimation, but also scene refocusing without suffering from limitation of resolution in comparison with recent approaches using special devices such as lens arrays in computational photography.