Depth from automatic defocusing

This paper presents a depth recovery method that gives the depth of any scene from its defocused images. The method combines depth from defocusing and depth from automatic focusing techniques. Blur information in defocused images is utilised to measure depth in a way similar to determining depth from automatic focusing but without searching for sharp images of objects. The proposed method does not need special scene illumination and involves only a single camera. Therefore, there are no correspondence, occlusion and intrusive emissions problems. The paper gives experimental results which demonstrate the accuracy of the method. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.