Ubiquitous Creation of Bas-Relief Surfaces with Depth-of-Field Effects Using Smartphones

This paper describes a new method to automatically generate digital bas-reliefs with depth-of-field effects from general scenes. Most previous methods for bas-relief generation take input in the form of 3D models. However, obtaining 3D models of real scenes or objects is often difficult, inaccurate, and time-consuming. From this motivation, we developed a method that takes as input a set of photographs that can be quickly and ubiquitously captured by ordinary smartphone cameras. A depth map is computed from the input photographs. The value range of the depth map is compressed and used as a base map representing the overall shape of the bas-relief. However, the resulting base map contains little information on details of the scene. Thus, we construct a detail map using pixel values of the input image to express the details. The base and detail maps are blended to generate a new depth map that reflects both overall depth and scene detail information. This map is selectively blurred to simulate the depth-of-field effects. The final depth map is converted to a bas-relief surface mesh. Experimental results show that our method generates a realistic bas-relief surface of general scenes with no expensive manual processing.