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Self-supervised depth estimation has recently demonstrated promising performance compared to the supervised methods on challenging indoor scenes. However, the majority of efforts mainly focus on exploiting photometric and geometric consistency via forward image warping and backward image warping, based on monocular videos or stereo image pairs. The influence of defocus blur to depth estimation is neglected, resulting in a limited performance for objects and scenes in out of focus. In this work, we propose the first framework for simultaneous depth estimation from a single image and image focal stacks using depth-from-defocus and depth-from-focus algorithms. The proposed network is able to learn optimal depth mapping from the information contained in the blur of a single image, generate a simulated image focal stack and all-in-focus image, and train a depth estimator from an image focal stack. In addition to the validation of our method on both synthetic NYUv2 dataset and real DSLR dataset, we also collect our own dataset using a DSLR camera and further verify on it. Experiments demonstrate that our system surpasses the state-of-the-art supervised depth estimation method over 4% in accuracy and achieves superb performance among the methods without direct supervision on the synthesized NYUv2 dataset, which has been rarely explored.
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This content will become publicly available on June 10, 2026
Blurry-Edges: Photon-Limited Depth Estimation from Defocused Boundaries
Extracting depth information from photon-limited, defocused images is challenging because depth from defocus (DfD) relies on accurate estimation of defocus blur, which is fundamentally sensitive to image noise. We present a novel approach to robustly measure object depths from photon-limited images along the defocused boundaries. It is based on a new image patch representation, Blurry-Edges, that explicitly stores and visualizes a rich set of low-level patch information, including boundaries, color, and smoothness. We develop a deep neural network architecture that predicts the Blurry-Edges representation from a pair of differently defocused images, from which depth can be analytically calculated using a novel DfD relation we derive. Our experiment shows that our method achieves the highest depth estimation accuracy on photon-limited images compared to a broad range of state-of-the-art DfD methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2431505
- PAR ID:
- 10650996
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 432 to 441
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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