Large aperture focus stacking with max-gradient flow by anchored rolling filtering.

ABSTRACT

Focus stacking is a computational technique to extend the depth of field through combining multiple images taken at various focus distances. However, in the large aperture case, there are always defects caused by the large blur scale, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been well studied. In our work, we propose a max-gradient flow-based method to reduce artifacts and obtain a high-quality all-in-focus image by anchored rolling filtering. First, we define a max-gradient flow to describe the gradient propagation in the stack. The points are divided into trivial and source points with this flow. The source points are extracted as true edge points and are utilized as anchors to refine the depth map and the composited all-in-focus image iteratively. The experiments show that our method can effectively suppress the incorrect depth estimations and give a high-quality all-in-focus image.