Digital shallow depth-of-field adapter for photographs

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method to synthesize shallow depth-of-field images from two input photographs taken with different aperture values. The basic approach is to estimate the depth map of a given scene using a DFD (depth-from-defocus) algorithm and blur an input image according to the estimated depth map. The depth information estimated by DFD contains much noise and error, while the estimation is rather accurate along the edges of the image. To overcome the limitation, we propose a depth map filling algorithm using a set of initial depth maps and a segmented image. After depth map filling, the depth map can be fine tuned by applying segment clustering and user interaction. Since our method blurs an input image according to the estimated depth information, it generates physically plausible result images with shallow depth-of-field. In addition to depth-of-field control, the proposed method can be utilized for digital refocusing and detail control in image stylization.