Depth restoration from defocused images using simulated annealing

The recovery of depth from defocused images is formulated as a 3-D image restoration problem. A defocused image is modeled as the combinatorial outcome of the depths and intensities of the volume elements (voxels) of an opaque 3-D object. A large depth-of-field image is used to constrain the intensities of the voxels. The depths of voxels are estimated from a highly defocused image by using simulated annealing to solve a constrained optimization problem. It is concluded that the method provides a framework for high-resolution depth recovery from defocused images. The method is computationally-intensive; however, it is amenable to parallel processing and is well suited for small field-of-interest applications.<<ETX>>