Refocusing images and videos with a conventional compact camera

Abstract

Digital refocusing is an interesting and useful tool for generating dynamic depth-of-field (DOF) effects in many types of photography such as portraits and creative photography. Since most existing digital refocusing methods rely on four-dimensional light field captured by special precisely manufactured devices or a sequence of images captured by a single camera, existing systems are either expensive for wide practical use or incapable of handling dynamic scenes. We present a low-cost approach for refocusing high-resolution (up to 8 mega pixels) images and videos based on a single shot using an easy to build camera-mirror stereo system. Our proposed method consists of four main steps, namely system calibration, image rectification, disparity estimation, and refocusing rendering. The effectiveness of our proposed method has been evaluated extensively using both static and dynamic scenes with various depth ranges. Promising experimental results demonstrate that our method is able to simulate various controllable realistic DOF effects. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first that allows one to refocus high-resolution images and videos of dynamic scenes captured by a conventional compact camera.