Real-MFF Dataset: A Large Realistic Multi-focus Image Dataset with Ground Truth

Multi-focus image fusion, a technique to generate an all-in-focus image from two or more source images, can benefit many computer vision tasks. However, currently there is no large and realistic dataset to perform convincing evaluation and comparison for exiting multi-focus image fusion. For deep learning methods, it is difficult to train a network without a suitable dataset. In this paper, we introduce a large and realistic multi-focus dataset containing 800 pairs of source images with the corresponding ground truth images. The dataset is generated using a light field camera, consequently, the source images as well as the ground truth images are realistic. Moreover, the dataset contains a variety of scenes, including buildings, plants, humans, shopping malls, squares and so on, to serve as a well-founded benchmark for multi-focus image fusion tasks. For illustration, we evaluate 10 typical multi-focus algorithms on this dataset.

An α-Matte Boundary Defocus Model Based Cascaded Network for Multi-focus Image Fusion

Capturing an all-in-focus image with a single camera is difficult since the depth of field of the camera is usually limited. An alternative method to obtain the all-in-focus image is to fuse several images focusing at different depths. However, existing multi-focus image fusion methods cannot obtain clear results for areas near the focused/defocused boundary (FDB). In this paper, a novel {\alpha}-matte boundary defocus model is proposed to generate realistic training data with the defocus spread effect precisely modeled, especially for areas near the FDB. Based on this {\alpha}-matte defocus model and the generated data, a cascaded boundary aware convolutional network termed MMF-Net is proposed and trained, aiming to achieve clearer fusion results around the FDB. More specifically, the MMF-Net consists of two cascaded sub-nets for initial fusion and boundary fusion, respectively; these two sub-nets are designed to first obtain a guidance map of FDB and then refine the fusion near the FDB. Experiments demonstrate that with the help of the new {\alpha}-matte boundary defocus model, the proposed MMF-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Boundary Aware Multi-Focus Image Fusion Using Deep Neural Network

Since it is usually difficult to capture an all-in-focus image of a 3D scene directly, various multi-focus image fusion methods are employed to generate it from several images focusing at different depths. However, the performance of existing methods is barely satisfactory and often degrades for areas near the focused/defocused boundary (FDB). In this paper, a boundary aware method using deep neural network is proposed to overcome this problem. (1) Aiming to acquire improved fusion images, a 2-channel deep network is proposed to better extract the relative defocus information of the two source images. (2) After analyzing the different situations for patches far away from and near the FDB, we use two networks to handle them respectively. (3) To simulate the reality more precisely, a new approach of dataset generation is designed. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.