Artificial Intelligence to Design a Mask Insensible to the Distance From the Camera to the Scene Objects

Abstract

The sharpness of an image depends on the spatial frequency response of the photographic imaging system and the sensor characteristics. In conventional digital cameras, only those objects within a distance range are in focus, while other objects are captured with different amounts of blurring depending on their distance to the focal plane. This can be desired for some applications; however, this can also be undesired because some objects in the scene may be blurred and impossible to recover. In the field of augmented reality, simulating this natural effect of showing sharp objects in combination with blurred objects increases the visual realism of augmented video. In order to simulate this effect, it is very important to capture all objects in the scene with high quality so that it could be possible to dynamically blur different objects in the scene at runtime. In this paper, we present an algorithm to find a set of possible complex-amplitude transmittance masks capable of considerably reducing the impact of focus errors in the scene objects. Computer simulations are used to compare the masks found in this paper with a classic mask in the state of the art. The main contribution of this paper is the use of Chebyshev polynomials to model an optical mask, and then, use artificial intelligence to establish some properties of this mask, such as the depth of field, the resolution, and the amount of gathered light.