Coded Aperture Pairs for Depth from Defocus and Defocus Deblurring

The classical approach to depth from defocus (DFD) uses lenses with circular apertures for image capturing. We show in this paper that the use of a circular aperture severely restricts the accuracy of DFD. We derive a criterion for evaluating a pair of apertures with respect to the precision of depth recovery. This criterion is optimized using a genetic algorithm and gradient descent search to arrive at a pair of high resolution apertures. These two coded apertures are found to complement each other in the scene frequencies they preserve. This property enables them to not only recover depth with greater fidelity but also obtain a high quality all-focused image from the two captured images. Extensive simulations as well as experiments on a variety of real scenes demonstrate the benefits of using the coded apertures over conventional circular apertures.