Efficient graph cut optimization for shape from focus

Shape From Focus refers to the inverse problem of recovering the depth in every point of a scene from a set of differently focused 2D images. Recently, some authors stated it in the variational framework and solved it by minimizing a non-convex functional. However, the global optimality on the solution is not guaranteed and evaluations are often application-specific. To overcome these limits, we propose to globally and efficiently minimize a convex functional by decomposing it into a sequence of binary problems using graph cuts. To illustrate the genericity of such a decomposition-based approach, data-driven strategies are considered, allowing us to optimize (in terms of reconstruction error) the choice of the depth values for a given number of possible depths. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluation on Middlebury datasets and we show that, according to classic statistics on error values, the proposed approach exhibits high performance and robustness against corrupted data.