Patent ID: 8432434

Claim:
A method for reconstructing a dynamic scene as depths and an extended depth of field (EDOF) video, comprising the steps of: acquiring, with a video camera, a focal stack of the dynamic scene, wherein the focal stack includes a sequence of frames at consecutive time instants; determining an optical flow between the frames of the focal stack; warping the frames according to the optical flow to align the frames and to generate a virtual static focal stack for each time instance; and generating a depth map and a texture map for each virtual static focal stack using a depth from defocus (DFD) method, wherein the texture map corresponds to an EDOF image, wherein the DFD uses a spatio-temporal Markov random field (MRF) minimized by an energy function E(s) E ⁡ ( s ) = ∑ p ∈ ⁢ D p ⁡ ( s p ) + α ⁢ ∑ { p , q } ⁢ V pq ⁡ ( s p , s q ) , wherein a data term D p (s p ) is for superpixel p with depth level s p , a smoothness term V pq (s p , s q ) is for neighboring superpixels p and q, and α controls a degree of regularization, the smoothness term is V pq (s p , s q )=w pq |s p −s q |, |s p −s q | penalizes depth discontinuities between the neighboring superpixels p and q, and w pq is a spatio-temporal weighting factor, the weight w pq between two spatially neighboring superpixels p and q is determined by a similarity in an average colors of the two superpixels w pq =exp(−(∥I p −I q ∥)/τ), where I p and I q are the average colors of the superpixels p and q, and τ is a control parameter for the similarity of the average colors.