A novel multi-focus image capture and fusion system for macro photography

This paper proposes a novel multi-focus image capture and fusion system for macro photography. The system consists of three components. The first component is a novel multi-focus image capture device which can capture multiple macro images taken at different focus distances from a photographic subject, with high precision. The second component is a feature based method which can align multiple in-focus images automatically. The third component is a new multi-focus image fusion method which can combine multiple macro images to a fused image with a greater depth of field. The proposed image fusion method is based on Gaussian and Laplacian pyramids with a novel weight map selection strategy. Several data sets are captured and fused by the proposed system to verify the hardware and software design. Subjective and objective methods are also used to evaluate the proposed system. By analyzing the experimental results, it shows that this system is flexible and efficient, and the quality of the fused image is comparable to the results of other methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.