Focus measurement and all in-focus image synthesis for light-field rendering

Light field rendering is a fundamental method of image-based rendering that synthesizes free-viewpoint images from a set of multiviewpoint images. It is known that this method causes focus-like effects on synthesized images. A problem is that the range of the “focused” depth is too limited in most practical cases. In this paper, we propose a new measure for stably evaluating the “focus” on synthesized images by light-field rendering. We also describe a method of synthesizing an all in-focus image that is clear and sharp throughout the entire scene: First, we synthesize multiple images with different “focused” depths, and then integrate the in-focus parts of those images that can be detected with the “focus measure” we propose. We conducted experiments to demonstrate that our method effectively enhances the quality of the final synthetic images. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 37(1): 1–12, 2006; Published online in Wiley InterScience (). DOI 10.1002sscj.20512

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