Depth of field synthesis from sparse views.pdfVIP

Computers Graphics 55 (2016) 21–32 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers Graphics journal homepage: /locate/cag Technical Section Depth of ?eld synthesis from sparse views$ Xin Liu, Jon G. Rokne n Department of Computer Science, The University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4 article info Article history: Received 13 August 2015 Received in revised form 7 October 2015 Accepted 26 October 2015 Available online 19 November 2015 Keywords: Image synthesis Depth of ?eld Sparse view Visibility abstract Computer generated images are most easily generated as pinhole images whereas images obtained with optical lenses exhibit a Depth-of-Field (DOF) effect. This is due to the fact that optical lenses gather light across ?nite apertures whereas the simulation of a pinhole lens means that the light is gathered through an in?nitesimal small aperture, thus producing sharp images at any depth. Simulating the physical process of gathering light across a ?nite aperture can be done for example with distributed ray tracing, but it is computationally much more expensive than the simulation through an in?nitesimal aperture. The usual way of simulating lens effects is therefore to produce a pinhole image and then post processes the image to approximate the DOF. Post processing algorithms are fast but suffer from incorrect visibilities. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm that tackles the visibility issue with a sparse set of views rendered through the optical center of the lens and several peripheral viewpoints distributed on the lens. All peripheral images are warped towards the central view to create a Layered-Depth-Image (LDI), so that all observed 3D points located on the same central view-ray are stacked on the same pixel of the LDI. Then, each pixel in the LDI is conceptually scattered into a Point-Spread-Function (PSF) and blended in depth order. While the scatter method is very inef?cient on a GPU, we propose a selectivegather method for DOF syn