Focus Stacking with High Fidelity and Superior Visual Effects

Focus stacking is a technique in computational photography, and it synthesizes a single all-in-focus image from different focal plane images. It is difficult for previous works to produce a high-quality all-in-focus image that meets two goals: high-fidelity to its source images and good visual effects without defects or abnormalities. This paper proposes a novel method based on optical imaging process analysis and modeling. Based on a foreground segmentation - diffusion elimination architecture, the foreground segmentation makes most of the areas in full-focus images heritage information from the source images to achieve high fidelity; diffusion elimination models the physical imaging process and is specially used to solve the transition region (TR) problem that is a long-term neglected issue and degrades visual effects of synthesized images. Based on extensive experiments on simulated dataset, existing realistic dataset and our proposed BetaFusion dataset, the results show that our proposed method can generate high-quality all-in-focus images by achieving two goals simultaneously, especially can successfully solve the TR problem and eliminate the visual effect degradation of synthesized images caused by the TR problem.