Focused image recovery from two defocused images recorded with different camera settings

Two new methods are presented for recovering the focused image of an object from only two blurred images recorded with different camera parameter settings. The camera parameters include lens position, focal length, and aperture diameter. First a blur parameter sigma is estimated using one of our proposed depth-from-defocus methods. Then one of the two blurred images is deconvolved to recover the focused image. The first method is based on a spatial domain convolution/deconvolution transform. This method requires only the knowledge of sigma of the camera's point spread function (PSF). It does not require information about the actual form of the camera's PSF. The second method, in contrast to the first, requires full knowledge of the form of the PSF. As part of the second method, we present a calibration procedure for estimating the camera's PSF for different values of the blur parameter sigma. In the second method, the focused image is obtained through deconvolution in the Fourier domain using a Wiener filter. For both methods, the results of experiments on actual defocused images recorded by a CCD camera are given. The first method requires much less computation than the second method. The first method gives satisfactory results for up to medium levels of blur and the second method gives good results for up to relatively high levels of blur.