A new focus measure operator for enhancing image focus in 3D shape recovery

Measuring the image focus is an important issue in Shape from Focus methods. Conventionally, the Sum of Modified Laplacian, Gray Level Variance (GLV), and Tenengrad techniques have been used frequently among various focus measure operators for estimating the focus levels in a sequence of images. However, they have various issues such as fixed window size and suboptimal focus quality. To solve these problems, a new focus measure operator based on the adaptive sum of weighted modified Laplacian is proposed. First, the adaptive window size selection algorithm based on the GLV is applied. Next, appropriate weights are assigned to the Modified Laplacian values in the image window based on the distance between the center pixel and neighboring pixels. Finally, the Weighted Modified Laplacian values in the image window are summed. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.